The Ringer - 1999 Movies Week: A Celebration of the Best Year in Film2019-03-29T10:09:56-04:00http://www.theringer.com/rss/stream/180461382019-03-29T10:09:56-04:002019-03-29T10:09:56-04:00Make the Case: Why ‘Three Kings’ Was the Best and Most Predictive Movie of 1999
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.adamvillacin.com/" target="_blank">Adam Villacin</a></figcaption>
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<p>This film foresaw everything: the cynicism of invading the Middle East. The horrors of a refugee crisis. The movie stardom of George Clooney. The madness of David O. Russell. </p> <p id="wMa6nO"><em>Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18282097/1999-movies-week-a-celebration-of-the-best-year-in-film"><em>1999 Movies Week</em></a><em>, a celebration of one of the best years in film history. Throughout the week, </em>The Ringer<em> will highlight some of the year’s best, most interesting films, and in this series, make the case for why a specific movie deserves to be called that year’s best. Next up is </em>Three Kings, <em>David O. Russell’s Desert Storm–set comedy heist</em>. </p>
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<p id="z2fFhA">George Clooney really, really wanted to be the star of <em>Three Kings</em>. David O. Russell really, really didn’t want that. Clooney—still best known as <em>ER’s</em> Dr. Doug Ross and an also-ran Batman—sought out auteurs like Steven Soderbergh and the Coen brothers to burnish his credibility and jump-start meaningful projects. In 1997, he was passed a copy of Russell’s script by emissaries inside Warner Bros. Russell, in the aftermath of two much-admired, if small, indies (<em>Spanking the Monkey</em> and <em>Flirting With Disaster</em>) was a predictable target for the actor. Daring, funny, formally unrestrained, and a little nutty, the filmmaker had the makings of a modern-day Robert Altman. In 1999, Clooney shared with <a href="https://ew.com/article/2005/10/28/set-desert-storm-movie-three-kings/"><em>Entertainment Weekly</em></a> all the ways he tried to capture Russell’s attention.</p>
<blockquote><p id="fmUWwd">He wrote Russell a letter self-deprecatingly signed “George Clooney, TV Actor”; he offered to show Russell an early cut of <em>Out of Sight</em>; he even showed up on Russell’s doorstep in New York City to plead his case. “He opened the door with his video camera,” says Clooney. “It’s very annoying. And he said, ‘Does this bother you?’ And I said, ‘It will only if I don’t get the job…. If I end up in <em>The Making of Three Kings</em> and I’m not in the movie, then I’ll look like an a–hole.”’</p></blockquote>
<p id="1SVWYo">Russell had pined after recent Oscar winner Nicolas Cage for the role of Major Archie Gates, an Army vet on the brink of retirement who’s grown cynical at the end of the Desert Storm conflict. He didn’t think Clooney had the grit or gravitas to pull off the role; he wasn’t Archie, he was that guy from <em>One Fine Day</em>. Then Russell saw <em>From Dusk Till Dawn</em>, Robert Rodriguez’s splattering Mexican vampire road movie, and began to reconsider. (Also: Cage opted for Martin Scorsese’s <em>Bringing Out the Dead</em>.) Soon, Dr. Doug was Gates, and <em>Three Kings</em> had a green light at a major studio with a $50 million budget. Little did Clooney and Russell know what their union would portend.</p>
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<p id="je1344"><em>Three Kings </em>is a film forged in unholy unions. Clooney and Russell famously battled throughout the chaotic production of the film—physically wrestling and shouting at one another repeatedly over Russell’s notoriously obtuse, furious, and unorthodox directing style. “He’s a weirdo, and he’s hard to talk to,” Clooney said at the time, “but that’s what makes his writing unique and interesting.” They clashed, just as the styles of the film clashed. <em>Three Kings </em>is a heist flick that cracks its safes inside a war movie acting like a comedy shot by the Maysles brothers and Michael Bay’s bastard son. Current events collide with ancient history. Cultures are thrown together in service of theft. Families are torn apart without reason.</p>
<p id="Bz4aby">The film follows four soldiers—Clooney’s Gates, Ice Cube’s Chief, Mark Wahlberg’s Troy, and Spike Jonze’s Conrad—on a rogue mission as the U.S. Army prepares to leave Iraq at the end of Desert Storm. After getting a tip from a map wedged inside the asshole of a Iraqi soldier (seriously), the four men go in search of $23 million of Kuwaiti gold bullion that has been stolen by Saddam Hussein. (The story is based on a script written by John Ridley, which Russell claimed to have never read. Ridley earned a story credit in arbitration.) The movie’s plot is an extraordinary setup that allows for some big thinking and equally big risk. David O. Russell was considered brilliant, but unproven.</p>
<p id="jY5q28">“Everybody was extremely excited about the script,” producer Charles Roven told <em>EW</em>, ”but everybody also recognized that this wasn’t what we call a commercial fastball down the middle. But that’s the point — you don’t get into business with David and think that’s what you’re going to get.” </p>
<p id="ILV81F"><em>Three Kings </em>is about four forgotten grunts looking to make a little something extra. It’s riven with ideas about what service is worth, the cable newsification of international conflict, the rise of an MTV-addled editing style, the empty consumerist impulses of a disaffected generation, and about 15 other capital-T themes. Released little more than a year after Steven Spielberg’s forcibly hallowed <em>Saving Private Ryan</em>, <em>Three Kings </em>is different—it’s reckless and sneering. Visually, it has a distorting, cauterized appearance. It combines a frenetic handheld shooting style shot on Ektachrome film stock that Russell used to create the feel of a dried-out newspaper with classical, majestic Steadicam movements. Production designer Catherine Hardwicke—who would go on to an accomplished directing career of her own—creates a tangible Iraq that feels not so much more exotic than suburban Arizona. (Which, of course, is where the movie was shot.) It often feels like a movie trying to drag your eye beyond the frame, whether moving quickly from busted-down bunker doors into tunnels filled with pilfered bounties or elegantly following a slow procession of Iraqi refugees traipsing across the desert landscape, a refurbished vision lifted from David Lean’s <em>Lawrence of Arabia</em>. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="0COCtK"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Make the Case: ‘The Insider’ Is About the Cost of Doing What’s Right—and It’s the Best Film of 1999","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/27/18283731/the-insider-al-pacino-russell-crowe-best-movies-1999"},{"title":"Make the Case: ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Is Actually a Comedy, and the Best Film of 1999","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18281132/eyes-wide-shut-best-movie-1999-stanley-kubrick-tom-cruise"},{"title":"‘Star Wars: Episode 1–The Phantom Menace’ Is the Most Important Movie of 1999. Seriously.","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/28/18282707/star-wars-phantom-menace-episode-one-george-lucas-1999"},{"title":"‘Being John Malkovich’ Was a Head Trip Masterpiece—and the Best Film of 1999","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/25/18280334/being-john-malkovich-spike-jones-best-movies-1999"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="eQ1mPk">The Iraq citizens caught between Gates’s scheming troop and Saddam’s itinerant army in the aftermath of the cease-fire represent the movie’s aching heart, the storytelling device that separates this movie from <em>Ocean’s 14: Just Desert</em>. They also stand in for something real, the living collateral damage of George H.W. Bush’s showboating military chess match. The Persian Gulf War was famed for its overmanaged visual dynamism, with figures like General Norman Schwarzkopf comfortably escorting the press through the various stages of Western dominance in the Middle East. Clooney’s character is assigned a similar fate, guiding Nora Dunn’s Adriana Cruz, a steely Christiane Amanpour–esque reporter. It’s this degrading gig that drives him to banditry. He’s burned through his own integrity so he can help cable news hacks restage significant events in the conflict. He gets back to zero by robbing a mad dictator. This is a movie about values lost and regained. </p>
<p id="V0bEWx">Is it any wonder everyone was angry and neurotic throughout this shoot? Russell would go on to have more public blowouts—most notoriously with Lily Tomlin on the set of 2004’s <em>I Heart Huckabees</em>—and make films that garnered bigger box office returns and more awards. But <em>Three Kings </em>is his most brazen and thrilling work. This has become hackneyed phrasing in contemporary movie writing, but they <em>really</em> don’t make ’em like this anymore, telling stories this weird, violent, and caustic, right up until they turn simultaneously sentimental and critical of U.S. foreign policy. The conclusion is like a magic trick.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="1Qkxjo">Near the climax, Ice Cube’s character downs an attacking helicopter by hurling a Nerf football stuffed with C4 at it. I can’t find a better metaphor for this movie. (Though the viscerally unnerving animation of what happens when <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8j4GIRYbZw">a human body absorbs a bullet</a> probably runs a close second.) It earned more than $100 million and was lauded by critics—it’s said to be one of Bill Clinton’s favorite movies released during his administration—but <em>Three Kings </em>hasn’t quite endured as the generational totem one might expect. It laid the groundwork for the next century’s sociopolitical struggles. The events of September 11 would arrive less than two years later and augur a misbegotten return to Iraq. The privatized military operations executed by companies like the Dick Cheney–led Halliburton that would follow reflect a generation of soldiers eager to get properly paid for their experience in conflict. The refugee crisis resonates clearly today, from Europe through Latin America and the Middle East. This movie saw the future, even if it doesn’t always seem present. It’s too angry, too confusing, too violent. It’s a lot like war.</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/29/18286791/three-kings-david-o-russell-george-clooney-mark-wahlberg-ice-cube-spike-jonzeSean Fennessey2019-03-29T06:30:00-04:002019-03-29T06:30:00-04:00The Frantic, Furious Making of the Late-’90s Cult Movie Classic ‘Go’
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<figcaption>Leonardo Santamaria</figcaption>
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<p>How one wild night in L.A. was captured by one wild production, headed up by an unpredictable auteur, a hungry screenwriter, and a cast of about-to-be superstars</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="RkVuN8">Doug Liman had a decision to make. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlM6ZrnJ7Wc"><em>Getting In</em></a>, the movie he’d directed right after getting out of USC film school, had gone straight to video. But then 1996 brought his indie sensation, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/5/26/16043532/doug-liman-swingers-hockey-game-podcast-achievement-oriented-19c7faac0b9a"><em>Swingers</em></a>. Made for only $250,000, it followed the lives of crying<strong> </strong>and carousing unknown actors in Los Angeles. Its release attached a scotch-powered jetpack to the careers of Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau. <em>Swingers</em> earned $4.55 million at the box office, though it found an even greater audience once it hit the home video market. It’s had such a deep cultural impact that 23 years later, jag-offs are still yelling “Vegas, baby!” when their planes touch down at McCarran.</p>
<p id="j3m5UY">So what was Liman going to do next?</p>
<p id="OI1fyy">To the delight of his representation, major film studios were offering him comedies with budgets in the low $20 millions. He was heading toward <em>Heartbreakers</em>, a film about a mother-daughter conwoman team written by the guys behind <em>Liar Liar</em> and <em>The Little Rascals</em>. Then one day, when Liman was leaving his Manhattan apartment, he heard his phone ringing as he stood in the hallway waiting for the elevator. He was hoping it was a girl, but it turned out to be the producer Mickey Liddell, pitching him to direct a movie called <em>Go</em>.</p>
<p id="C0zH23">The film told three interlocking stories, each tied to an ecstacy deal initiated in the checkout line of a cruddy Hollywood supermarket. It featured crackling dialogue, a Christmas-themed rave, closeted soap opera stars, a car chase on the Vegas strip, <em>Beverly Hills, 90210</em> jokes, iodine poisoning, a tantric threesome, and a telepathic cat named Huxley.</p>
<p id="4TStV8">Even before the phone call, Liman felt like <em>Heartbreakers</em> was too easy, that it was too much money for a comedy. <em>Go </em>had a proposed budget around one-fifth of what he’d spend on <em>Heartbreakers</em>. His agent cautioned that if Liman did another indie and things went down in flames, he wouldn’t get the opportunity to work with a major studio again. On the other hand, if he completed <em>Heartbreakers</em> now, regardless of how well it did, his career would be set.</p>
<p id="BtzJgJ">Unlike other marquee indie directors of the era, Liman wasn’t a writer, so he wasn’t generating his own material. It was the ethos driving <em>Go</em>’s<em> </em>script that convinced him to pick the project. “I had a charmed youth in that I did a lot of crazy things and no one ever got hurt,” Liman says. “I had this belief that you have a get-out-of-jail-free card when you’re 18. And I recognize there’s a lot of white privilege connected to that get-out-of-jail-free card now that I wasn’t as sensitive to at the time because I only knew my own experience.”</p>
<p id="0TJFXV">“What I saw in <em>Go</em> was a story that was celebrating: Do crazy shit while you’re young,” he continues. “You can get away with it when you’re young.”</p>
<p id="Xfg4HU">When you talk to people who’ve worked with Liman, they’ll describe him as “a character and a half” or “an interesting cat.” What they mean is that he’s a weirdo who makes preposterous choices that should result in failure but often end in success.</p>
<p id="RdJQwf">Looking at <em>Go </em>now, 20 years after it was released in April 1999, you can see a convergence of several film trends of that era. There’s the absorption of the creators of 1990s indie cinema into the mainstream moviemaking landscape. There’s a new generation of bright young actors ready to make the leap from teenage fare to more adult material. There’s Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic quirks becoming modern conventions. Yet throughout the making of <em>Go</em>, there was moment after moment that should have led to disaster. Still, things managed to work out. Sort of. </p>
<p id="I0Pp3h"><em>Go </em>wasn’t an abject financial disaster, but it was far from a hit. It’s not quite a cult classic, but over the years it’s built a contingent of dedicated fans. Assistants squealed when I told them which film I wanted to interview their bosses about. Lauded careers were launched off of it. Over the two ensuing decades, the amount of success that’s come to the people involved in the film—from the actors, to the crew, to the studio executives who got involved—is incredible.</p>
<p id="NPzw5M">Liman has made other films that have grossed far more money, like <em>Mr. & Mrs. Smith </em>and <em>The Bourne Identity</em>. Some of his work is more beloved by film devotees, like <em>Swingers</em> and <em>Edge of Tomorrow</em>. Still, Liman considers <em>Go </em>his best film. “We’re so trained toward short-term rewards that the true success of a movie has to be evaluated in 10 or 20 years after it comes out, and so, if you ask how I feel about how [<em>Go</em>] was received from where I sit today, I couldn’t be more proud of it and it couldn’t have been received better,” Liman says. “I do like films, like <em>Mr. & Mrs. Smith</em>, where you do get some huge opening weekend, but if I had to trade one or the other, it lasting and being something that people will watch today is something that is more important to me.”</p>
<p id="FESknt">There’s a scrappiness to <em>Go</em> that could only have been generated by a group of people who, much like the movie’s characters, often found themselves in situations where they were in over their heads. As the film’s editor, Stephen Mirrione, says, “One of the things I like about [<em>Go</em>] is it’s a movie about idiots that’s made by a bunch of goofballs, a bunch of knuckleheads.”</p>
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<figcaption>Doug Liman</figcaption>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="kAvKrP">Sitting inside his home in L.A.’s Hancock Park neighborhood, screenwriter John August repeats one of his maxims: “My favorite genre of movie is movies that get made.” His filmography includes <em>Big Fish</em>, the <em>Charlie’s Angels</em> adaptation from 2000, the <em>Charlie and the Chocolate Factory </em>remake, and the forthcoming live-action <em>Aladdin</em>. But back in 1998, when he was nearing the end of his 20s, nothing August wrote had made it to the screen. He’d been hired to adapt <em>How to Eat Fried Worms</em> for Ron Howard at Imagine Entertainment and <em>A Wrinkle in Time </em>for Dimension/Miramax, neither of which was anywhere close to being made. “I was really fortunate to be getting those jobs,” he says, “but I was only being considered for movies involving gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas.” </p>
<p id="tK3l2X">To expand the type of offers he was getting, he returned to a script for a short film called <em>X</em> that he wrote while enrolled in USC’s graduate film program. <em>X </em>is basically the first segment in <em>Go</em>. It tracks a young supermarket worker on the verge of eviction named Ronna who gets caught up in an ecstacy deal and ends up lying in a ditch outside a rave. In his head, August had already built out more of a backstory for Adam and Zack, the two guys who come into the grocery store looking to score, and Simon, Ronna’s English coworker who usually deals to them. For <em>Go</em> he created two more segments that focused on these characters and increased the connections among all three parts. </p>
<p id="l9xocd">There had been movies that had broken up the narrative and told related stories from different perspectives before—most famously Akira Kurosawa’s <em>Rashomon</em> and Jim Jarmusch’s <em>Mystery Train</em>—but those were the type of movies mostly taught at film school or shown at sticky-floored repertory theaters. Then 1994 brought Quentin Tarantino’s <em>Pulp Fiction</em>, which managed to popularize the concept. “The idea of restarting your movie was fine; it wasn’t just an experimental art-film kind of thing,” August explains of <em>Pulp Fiction</em>’s impact. “It was a thing that people could have said, ‘Oh, it’s like that.’ The ‘Oh, it’s like that’ has sort of been a blessing and a curse. It made it possible to make [<em>Go</em>], but also made it really easy to dismiss the film or to dismiss that gimmick as ‘<em>Pulp Fiction</em> did it first.’”</p>
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<p id="WeDQ5J">(It might not help that along with the pop-culture-peppered dialogue, <em>Go </em>also features two Tarantino-style <a href="https://vimeo.com/106708439">trunk shots</a>.)</p>
<p id="BxxYdN">When August began taking meetings for <em>Go</em>, the big studios were still buying spec scripts. But the real motivation was to show them what he was capable of. Because of its tonal shifts, <em>Go</em> could be read as an action movie, a comedy, a thriller, or whatever sample they needed it to be. Executives would tell August they loved his script, but they couldn’t make it. Instead they gave him dialogue-polishing work or offered him other gigs that didn’t involve gnomes.</p>
<p id="6BrMto">Then Banner Entertainment, a small production company, decided it wanted to put together <em>Go</em> as an independent feature with a $3.5 million budget, and it would bring August on as a coproducer who would be on set every day. Liman was always at the top of the list for director. “Doug, to this day, doesn’t take ‘no’ for anything, and it’s probably his strongest quality as a director,” says August. “He wasn’t scared of anything in the script.”</p>
<p id="Wncl1X">To assemble the large ensemble, they brought on Joseph Middleton, a casting director who was still diversifying his résumé. No one was attached to the film, so Middleton had a blank slate when filling out the roles. He had seen Taye Diggs in a production of <em>Rent</em>, so he had Liman fly out to New York to meet him for the part of Marcus, Simon’s far more capable friend. He booked Katie Holmes to play Ronna’s hesitant coworker, Claire, when she had only shot the pilot for <em>Dawson’s Creek</em> and before the show turned her into a <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/katie-holmes-a-girl-on-the-verge-231077/"><em>Rolling Stone</em> cover star</a>. Timothy Olyphant came in to audition for Zack or Adam and ended up with the role of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6e-UHBx__I">not too menacing</a> drug dealer Todd Gaines.<strong> </strong>Middleton even got Melissa McCarthy in her first film role for a memorable one-scene appearance. </p>
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<p id="4MDAuN">Middleton, who is now the head of casting for Paramount Pictures, continued working with Liman through the 2008 sci-fi action film <em>Jumper</em>. “The one thing I think about our relationship from the very beginning, and now I’ve known him for many years, is that he always made me defend who I thought was right,” says Middleton. “In that process I always knew if I was right, because I could fight for it.”</p>
<p id="aJhSUC">Even though <em>Go</em> was an indie, it quickly became a project that lots of young actors wanted to be a part of. “When they’re casting these ensembles, you go to the audition and you know everybody,” says Breckin Meyer, who won the role of Tiny, a white boy who is convinced his mother’s mother’s mother was black. “It’s every young actor you know. You go in there and you go, ‘Oh, it’s Seth Green. It’s this dude, Scotty Caan.’ And it always comes down to: <em>We all like this thing. I wonder who’s going to get it? </em>With <em>Go</em>, everyone knew it was a very cool script.”</p>
<p id="XgFybn">For the role of Ronna, Liman and Co. were determined to cast Sarah Polley, a Canadian teenager who had already soured on Hollywood. Though Christina Ricci was considered for the part, Polley remained the target. “I was a little bit obsessed,” Middleton confesses. (One of the few major differences between August’s <a href="https://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/Go-Spec.pdf">spec script</a> and the final film is that in the original, Ronna is African American.)</p>
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<figcaption>Katie Holmes and Sarah Polley</figcaption>
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<p id="WDUlxp">Polley’s performance in Atom Egoyan’s film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upeFO4qwfXM"><em>The Sweet Hereafter</em></a> convinced Liman that she was right for Ronna. “She just had this intensity in a young person I had never seen before,” he says. “Then when I met with her, clearly she was the best young actress working. I’m sure it was like meeting with Meryl Streep early in her career.”</p>
<p id="upuY0n">But before that meeting, Polley declined the role several times. “Every way in which they would’ve been pitching this movie to her is her worst nightmare,” says Liman. “Hot up-and-coming director who won MTV’s best new filmmaker award. That’s not the kind of movies she’s interested in being in.”</p>
<p id="2gqC0c">When the producers found out Polley was coming to L.A., they told her agent that if she didn’t take a lunch meeting with Liman they wouldn’t see any other clients for the film. So the two got together and as Liman described <em>Go</em>, she became intrigued. She told him she would read the script as she flew home to Toronto. Liman told her he’d send her a copy, but she explained that a car was waiting for her right then to take her to the airport and she was incredulous that he hadn’t thought to bring a script with him.</p>
<p id="B7Tba0">Liman ran to his car and rummaged through the mess in his trunk, looking for a copy. He found the script he’d passed to his editor, Mirrione, for notes. Liman and Mirrione had been working together since Liman’s student thesis film, and while Mirrione is direct with his opinions normally, when communicating with Liman he felt the freedom to be particularly harsh. “I look at the script because I know [Mirrione] had marked it up a little bit,” Liman recalls. “So I open it up and there’s a line circled and he’s written, ‘Stupid.’ And I flip to the next comment and he’s like, ‘Dumb line.’ I flip a few more pages and it says, ‘This makes no sense.’ Flip a few more pages and it says, ‘Why???’”</p>
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<p id="RSfTNh">With no other options, Liman gave Polley the script anyway. He is now convinced that it was this unexpected, and what some might call unprofessional, decision that ultimately won her over. “Sarah’s become a very close friend,” he says, “Knowing her personality, it was going to take something that drastic to get her to see that this was not going to be a traditional Hollywood movie.” </p>
<p id="VSZTPd">Then, with filming set to start in a few weeks, Banner Films producer Liddell learned that all the financing had dropped out. Without notifying anyone else, he sent the script to Harvey Weinstein, since Miramax had distributed <em>Swingers</em>. On a Sunday, Weinstein passed on the project, so Liddell informed the other producers and Liman that <em>Go</em> was dead. (Liddell declined to comment for this article, saying that he was on location in France for a project.)</p>
<p id="9Uqn7d">Undeterred, Liman, August, and producer Paul Rosenberg (who died in 2015), came into the film’s office on Monday morning looking for ways to revive the project. Liman and August didn’t have the connections to get the movie made, but Rosenberg, a former executive, began making calls as production assistants Xeroxed copies of the script and ferried them around town. “Paul was just calling up anybody he knew, anywhere in the business, and being like, ‘We have this amazing cast, a great script,’” says Liman. “Then he’d pass the phone to John August or myself to keep talking about the movie and he’d get on the phone with somebody else.”</p>
<p id="e5SToT">On Tuesday, they met with Ricky Strauss and Andrea Giannetti, two young executives at TriStar, a division of Sony Pictures. Strauss and Giannetti quickly convinced their bosses to take on <em>Go </em>as what was essentially a negative pickup deal, where the studio agrees to purchase an indie for a set dollar amount (regardless of whether it goes overbudget) in return for a split of the profits. “People were head-scratching a little bit about how high-concept [<em>Go</em>] was and how marketable it could have been, but it was such a good script, and people really wanted to be in business with Doug Liman and John and the cast,” says Strauss, who now works as the president of content and marketing for the forthcoming Disney+ streaming service.</p>
<p id="UTkF4b">By Wednesday, Liman was back scouting locations around L.A.</p>
<p id="YBsDhV"></p>
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<cite>United Archives GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo</cite>
<figcaption>Taye Diggs and Desmond Askew</figcaption>
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<p id="u2Ly7y">When Liman signed on, one of the first things the producers told him was that the car chase on the Las Vegas Strip that concludes the film’s second act would have to be cut for budget reasons. Liman instead decided to shoot the car chase as if he were helming a major studio film, dedicating almost a third of his budget to the scene and scrimping in other ways throughout the rest of the production. (With Sony’s involvement, the budget got bumped up to about $5 million, but all the extra money went toward making it a union- and Directors Guild–compliant shoot.)</p>
<p id="wEMpqY">He employed many of the cost-saving techniques he’d developed on <em>Swingers</em>. He shot it on an Aaton 35-millimeter, a camera usually reserved for making documentaries in the days before everything went digital. He could reload the Aaton<strong> </strong>with film in a matter of seconds, while for traditional cameras it took at least four minutes and caused delays in shooting as everyone used those opportunities to relight the scene or take breaks. The only problem with the Aaton was that it isn’t constructed for recording dialogue and makes as much noise as a sewing machine, so Liman would wrap it in a down jacket as he filmed. “Jon Favreau used to describe acting in <em>Swingers</em> like acting for a big fluffy snowball,” says Liman. </p>
<p id="gNQyD1">While making <em>Swingers</em>, instead of trying to manufacture settings, Liman would just film scenes that took place in parties or at bars in actual parties or bars, using unassuming bystanders as extras. Before anyone got too upset or the police came, he’d be gone. For <em>Go</em> he adopted a similarly frenetic pace.</p>
<p id="Rt0o6s">Some actors, such as James Duval, whose first films included <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/8/18255682/sex-drugs-prestige-tv-how-culture-came-around-to-gregg-araki">Gregg Araki’s microbudgeted teen apocalypse</a> trips <em>Totally F***cked Up</em> and <em>The Doom Generation</em>, were used to Liman’s approach. “[<em>Go</em>] still had a little bit more money, so we were running and gunning it, but not in the guerrilla style that I actually was used to,” Duval says. “That was really getting kicked out because you didn’t have money for locations. We had permits on [<em>Go</em>], which was a wonderful thing.”</p>
<p id="zBVtax">For others it was an adjustment. Jay Mohr had been booking lots of parts after <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGaLYBKeX8w">his role in <em>Jerry Maguire</em></a>, but <em>Go </em>was a different type of production. “He showed up exhausted because he had been out partying the night before for his first day of shooting,” says Liman. “By the end of the day he was like, ‘Jesus Christ, I haven’t been able to go back to my trailer once to nap. You literally haven’t stopped shooting.’”</p>
<p id="MYh2tn">Mohr says he came to enjoy Liman’s method because it reminded him of his work as a stand-up comic in New York, where he’d have to run around to different clubs in the city to get up at as many spots as possible in a night. There was only one occasion on <em>Go </em>when he objected to the breakneck speed. Says Mohr, “I remember in the scene where Bill Fichtner is naked when I come out of the bathroom in his house, I came out one time and he was standing there and I said, ‘Just so you guys know, it’s going to take me six takes to even not burst out laughing.’ And they said, ‘Well, the sun’s coming up, it can’t be six.’ Me not going with the flow for the first time in the movie, I said, ‘Well, you better put some <a href="https://www.filmtools.com/expendables/fabric/duvetyne.html">duvetyne</a> over those windows, because it ain’t happening within six. I know how far I can kick this football, and it’s six takes.’”</p>
<p id="Y5viJ5">The production fell behind schedule after only a few days, so the producers asked August to lead a small second-unit crew, picking up insert shots or handling reshoots once Liman moved on. As a result, August says you can often see his hands fill in for other actors on screen, whether it’s a little kid taking money from under a hotel room’s door or Scott Wolf rearranging the contents in the trunk of his Miata. After principal shooting wrapped, August would drive Liman’s Saab convertible around Los Angeles at night as the director stole cutaway shots out of the back.</p>
<p id="PE6T2n">To trim the budget, Liman acted as his own director of photography and often operated the camera himself, as he had on <em>Swingers</em>. It had an effect on the actors’ performances. “Doug had that camera on his shoulder and it had this immediacy and this feel to it that felt like there was a third eye that was always in the room,” says William Fichtner, who plays the police officer Burke.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="nsWORk"><q>“There was one point where I went to Doug and I said, ‘Maybe you should stop talking so much, because they can hear everything you’re saying and I think you’re scaring them, because you sound crazy.’” —Stephen Mirrione</q></aside></div>
<p id="9AVP6P">Recalling the scene where the cops tape a recording device onto Scott Wolf’s character’s crotch, Fichtner says, “We got in a little tiny bathroom. There wasn’t room for anybody. There was a boom in there, the four actors in the scene, and Doug with his camera. He would move that camera around so seamlessly. I remember that more than anything. And Jay Mohr being a maniac.”</p>
<p id="SMDMbn"><em>Go </em>was the first movie that Strauss had championed at TriStar, and he visited the set two or three times a week. “It was definitely hectic because there were constant changes,” he says. “The pages would come in the morning or the night before. People would talk about what the blocking was going to look like and how it was going to go, then there were some last-minute changes that were made from rehearsals or from Doug maybe changing his mind about lighting packages or where the scene should take place. And also we didn’t have a ton of money, so it was definitely scrappy, but it was wildly creative.”</p>
<p id="62TLH6">Another habit that Liman had developed on <em>Swingers </em>was not turning off the camera between takes, so when screening the dailies, everyone could hear his conversations with the actors. “Doug, sometimes his brain is working on a different frequency than the words that come out, so sometimes what he’s saying sounds a little idiotic, so it’s especially frightening if you’re a producer and you’re spending a lot of money and have all this responsibility,” says Mirrione. “There was one point where I went to Doug and I said, ‘Maybe you should stop talking so much, because they can hear everything you’re saying and I think you’re scaring them, because you sound crazy.’”</p>
<p id="cBuvdW">Drugs play a major role in <em>Go</em>, but it’s not a drug movie. Both Liman and August say they were never really into mind-altering substances. August says that of all the characters he created for the film, he’s most like Katie Holmes’s Claire, the wet blanket who manages to have more fun than anyone else, despite herself. Liman didn’t see himself in any of the characters, but says he had met a lot of people like Simon, the European eager to take in the full excitement and ridiculousness of the American experience. Desmond Askew, the English actor who plays him, remembers, “I was still growing up at that time. I wasn’t shooting bouncers or stealing Ferraris, but I think that’s what Doug and I talked about, and he really impressed upon me that that was what attracted him to my performance, this kind of wide-eyed sense of wonder. I remember him constantly saying, ‘Just think: puppy dog, puppy dog.’”</p>
<p id="7SC8vI"><em>Go</em> was also one of the first movies that touched on American dance music culture as it spread from its foundational homes in Detroit and Chicago. For the soundtrack, Liman brought on Julianne Jordan (neé Kelley), the now-celebrated music supervisor who got her first gig in that role on <em>Swingers</em>. Before shooting began, Liman, Jordan, and some of the producers would go to raves around L.A., where the director would surreptitiously steal shots that ended up in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdF_3U16SHk">ecstasy-evoking opening credits</a>. </p>
<p id="CKfrD7">Jordan was able to license tracks by ascendent electronic music acts Fatboy Slim, Leftfield, and Air, but the biggest coup was getting the Orange County ska pop band No Doubt to record the song “New” for the soundtrack. “For No Doubt, who at that time was massive, to say they will write an original song for a 6 million–dollar movie!” says Jordan. “You don’t see Ariana Grande saying she’s going to do that.”</p>
<p id="uAPfR5">For the film’s score, Jordan recommended that Liman work with BT, a young music producer and DJ who began playing classical piano when he was 4 and enrolled at the Berklee College of Music when he was 15. Liman showed up at BT’s house in Rockville, Maryland, unannounced with his dog and a VHS copy of rough-cut scenes from <em>Go</em>. The artist hadn’t even seen <em>Swingers</em> at that point. “We watched it in my living room,” says BT. “I had a studio in the upstairs of my house at the time. We kept running back and forth to upstairs and I was literally coming up with ideas on the fly.”</p>
<p id="FxRSRp">Shortly thereafter, BT moved to Los Angeles and still works as a film composer. “It was a special project,” he says. “It was something that had no <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temp_track">temp score</a>. I was like, ‘Oh my god, all movies are this awesome. They play you a film without any music in it and you just write whatever you want.’ Cut to me last week. I’m like pulling my frickin’ hair out, the director is going, ‘Can you make it more like the temp?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to get sued if it’s anything more like the temp.’”</p>
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<cite>AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo</cite>
<figcaption>Scott Wolf, Jay Mohr, and William Fichtner</figcaption>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="NNfI42">When John August watched an initial edit of <em>Go</em>, he felt sick. “When you talk to screenwriters, the first time you see your first cut of your first movie, you do just want to kill yourself,” he says. “It’s just like, nothing works the way you wanted it to work.”</p>
<p id="1624Sd">Unfortunately the studio felt similarly, and even recommended cutting the middle Las Vegas sequence. But the movie did surprisingly well at a test screening in the San Fernando Valley. The crowd even said that the Las Vegas segment was their favorite.</p>
<p id="x4alkj">Still, the production would need reshoots to fix the problems, which included having all the segments essentially begin with the same starting point—Simon giving his supermarket shift to Ronna. They also altered the ending so that Simon brings a comedic climax to Claire and the drug dealer Todd Gaines’s arc, which was originally far more violent.</p>
<p id="qxXSBE">As they continued editing, and as test-screening responses got even better, the film began to cohere. “Some of the most interesting editing I was doing in that movie was because Doug had no idea how to transition from one thing to the next, or he just forgot to get coverage of something,” says Mirrione. “We just had to be like, ‘OK, this is the intention, this is what we want to do. How can I just repurpose five different things and make something?’ For me, the palette of how to do that became the culture. The rave culture, the remix DJ culture, where you’re taking all this stuff and ripping it apart and deconstructing it, putting it back together in a different way. That was partly born out of the necessity of us just not knowing how to plan well enough ahead.” (Mirrione says he began working with Steven Soderbergh after the director saw <em>Go</em>. They’ve since collaborated on nine films together, including the <em>Ocean’s Eleven</em> trilogy. Mirrione won an Oscar in 2001 for his editing on <em>Traffic</em>.)</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="z9RgUS"><q>“Movies about this age are always like, ‘That’s the night that everything changed. I wanted to go against that trope.” —John August</q></aside></div>
<p id="klc1oR">Sony decided to premiere <em>Go</em> at Sundance in January 1999, which was vindication for Liman since the festival had rejected <em>Swingers</em>. With 15 relatives and 10 friends coming in for the showing, he learned he’d get only four tickets to the screening. Ever ingenious, he proposed that instead of the normal black hand stamps that audience members get when they turned in their ticket, they should have special flourescent <em>Go</em> stamps to align with the film’s rave theme. When the festival said the theater would need two of the special hand stampers, he ordered three and then stamped all his guests’ hands at dinner before they went to the movie.</p>
<p id="9Jk98G">The Sundance reception created anticipation for the film’s April release. When it hit theaters, critics were enthusiastic. In an A-rated <a href="https://ew.com/article/1999/04/16/go-4/">review in <em>Entertainment Weekly</em></a>, Owen Gleiberman wrote, “<em>Go</em> is a rave-generation joyride, a kind of junior <em>Pulp Fiction</em> that courses along on waves of freedom and excitement. For all that, there’s a ticklish intimacy to its tone.” Still, it disappointed at the box office, bringing in just under $17 million.</p>
<p id="MoYlgT">“I think that the audience was in the middle of changing its moviegoing habits,” says Strauss. “It wasn’t a broad, mainstream, bawdy comedy like others that had been successful during that late-’90s time. It was distinctive, and sometimes distinctive movies take time to get discovered. But it’s always been successful to me.”</p>
<p id="1uvNOe">Though August has gone on to an accomplished career writing commercial films, <em>Go</em> was something different. He’d wanted to create something about young people who didn’t learn anything or weren’t severely affected by their mistakes. “Movies about this age are always like, ‘That’s the night that everything changed,’” he says. “I wanted to go against that trope.”</p>
<p id="QiPhFm">The movie ends with Mannie, who has just survived an overdose, asking his friends Ronna and Claire what their plans are for New Year’s. And for all of Liman’s talk about picking <em>Go </em>because it was his last chance to make an antiestablishment film, he’s spent the past two decades confounding, and often frustrating, Hollywood with his <a href="https://variety.com/2008/film/columns/a-look-at-liman-s-filmmaking-process-1117981300/">distinctly unbridled approach</a> to moviemaking, with routinely bigger financial stakes.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="XXZucy">“Like the characters in <em>Go</em> who didn’t really grow up by the end of it, I made <em>Bourne Identity</em> afterward and if you talk to the people who worked on that movie, they wouldn’t think that I learned some lesson about, ‘Now he has to play by the rules,’” Liman says. “I think the emotional experience of making <em>Go</em> wasn’t necessarily followed entirely by quote-unquote growing up. But it was the last time I didn’t have to be self-conscious about being rebellious.” </p>
<p id="lgcvHk"><a href="https://twitter.com/ericducker?lang=en"><em>Eric Ducker</em></a><em> is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/29/18283794/go-making-of-doug-liman-john-august-sarah-polley-katie-holmes-no-doubtEric Ducker2019-03-28T09:25:42-04:002019-03-28T09:25:42-04:00‘The Matrix’ Changed Everything, but the Little Details Made It Even Greater
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<figcaption>Warner Bros./Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>Beyond blue pill or red pill and bullet time, here are the smaller elements of the 1999 sci-fi action movie that helped make it an enduring classic </p> <p id="GbGQqg"><em>Editor’s note, Dec. 20, 2021: Ahead of the release of</em> The Matrix Resurrections<em>,</em> <em>revisit this March 2019 article about what made the original great.</em></p>
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<p id="yiM3Au">These are some of the stories that come up when you search for articles about <em>The Matrix</em> on the internet: How <em>The Matrix</em> Changed Movies <a href="https://www.cinelinx.com/movie-stuff/item/13594-how-the-matrix-changed-movies-forever.html">Forever</a>; <em>The Matrix</em> Is the Movie That Changed <a href="https://www.stardem.com/blogs/moviereview/the-matrix-is-the-movie-that-changed-everything/article_b0d36d03-f32e-510e-9ead-1858a2c1b33e.html">Everything</a>; How <em>The Matrix</em> Changed the Rules for Action <a href="http://www.whoaisnotme.net/articles/2002_0803_how.htm">Movies</a>; Neo’s Stunt Guy Chad Stahelski on How <em>The Matrix</em> Changed Movie Action <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/neo-stunt-double-on-how-the-matrix-changed-action-forever.html">Forever</a>; Six Ways <em>The Matrix</em> Changed <a href="https://torontosun.com/2014/03/20/six-ways-the-matrix-changed-hollywood/wcm/a1567035-a035-499a-9d3c-9dd4f9dfc3a0">Hollywood</a>. There are more, of course, but the point is clear: <em>The Matrix</em>, a philosophy movie disguised as an action movie about a computer programmer who learns that machines run the world and everyone is asleep inside of a digital simulation, changed movie things irrevocably. </p>
<p id="zIKpuf">Let’s do here what we did with <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2017/12/5/16735954/good-will-hunting-20th-anniversary-matt-damon-ben-affleck-robin-williams"><em>Good Will Hunting</em></a>: Rather than go through and reiterate all of the big things that <em>The Matrix</em> was able to accomplish (making action movies feel like they could be smart; the creation of bullet time; formalizing what the internet would look like in cinema; turning wire-work fight scenes into pieces of art; etc.), let’s mill around a bit in the (slightly) smaller details and pieces of the movie. </p>
<div id="eiNZ3F"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Vb6bA4J1Gbg?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="b4O8Jf"><strong>“The orders were for your protection.”</strong> That line has always been interesting to me. It’s what Agent Smith tells the police lieutenant at the beginning of the movie after Smith arrives at a building to find that the lieutenant has already sent two units up to apprehend Trinity. (The lieutenant was supposed to wait for Smith and the two other agents to get there before he did anything.) It’s interesting because it implies that Smith cares at least a tiny amount for the humans—otherwise he wouldn’t try to protect them. The idea that Smith is slightly taken with the humans is fun to think about (and it kind of makes sense, given that Smith’s whole goal in <em>The Matrix</em> is to get himself unplugged from the machines so he can become an actual human). Of course, another reading of the situation is that Smith just made up the thing about wanting to protect the police and that really what he wanted was for the police to wait for him because he knew that the police’s attempt to capture Trinity would get in the way of the agents’ attempt to capture Trinity. </p>
<p id="nou1qX"><strong>When Trinity breaks that one cop’s arm, then smashes his nose up into his brain, then karate kicks him across the room</strong>. This is such a great “BUCKLE THE FUCK UP” moment. It establishes immediately how serious the stakes are and how real everything is. And then right when you think you have a grasp on things, she runs up a wall and then jumps across a 50-foot building gap and then Superman-flies her way through a window in a different building, and you realize that you don’t have a grasp on one good goddamn thing. </p>
<p id="Ib7sKb"><strong>When Trinity answers the call in the phone booth and then gets smashed by the truck that the agent crashes into it. </strong>The six-minute stretch that opens the movie is incredible. (I still remember watching <em>The Matrix</em> at the theater with my high school girlfriend and seeing this part and turning to the girlfriend and making some joke like, “Man, she <em>really</em> likes talking on the phone.”)</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="iFipoH"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The 50 Best Movies of 1999, Part 1","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/25/18274634/1999-movies-ranking-top-50"},{"title":"The 50 Best Movies of 1999, Part 2","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18277205/1999-movies-ranking-top-50-part-two"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="MIBlGD"><strong>Rewatching it after you know that Cypher is a bad guy</strong>. They basically beat you over the head with clues that Cypher is a bad guy in the opening six minutes of the movie and you don’t even register it because of all of the other shit that’s going on. There’s the part in the very beginning before we see any actual people when Trinity and Cypher are talking on the phone and she points out that it sounds like someone is listening in and asks him if he’s sure the line is clean and he says, “Yeah, of course I’m sure.” And there’s the part where Trinity talks to Morpheus and she says, “The line was traced. I don’t know how.” And there’s the part where, after one of the agents drives the truck into the phone booth as Trinity disappears back into the Matrix, the agents all gather together and one of them says that it doesn’t matter that she escaped because they know that the person who fed them the information about where she was going to be was actually telling the truth. </p>
<p id="csJtdP"><strong>The score</strong>. It’s brilliant all the way across, but especially in moments when it has to do the heavy lifting, the most obvious example being that stretch from the time that Neo answers the phone at his desk at work up until he accidentally drops it off the side of the building as Morpheus tries to help him escape from the agents. I was having a conversation with Sean Fennessey several months ago about movies and he mentioned how sometimes a location can serve as a character in a movie, like how New York is a character in <em>The Warriors</em>. It’s the same way here, except the score is a character in the movie. </p>
<p id="jxAAdk"><strong>The way Neo gives the middle finger to Agent Smith</strong>. I hope there was a moment when everyone was sitting around on the <em>Nebuchadnezzar</em> and someone was explaining to Neo how deadly Agent Smith is, and Neo was like, “Oh shit. That guy is who’s been killing everyone? I gave him the finger when he pulled me in for questioning,” and then everyone started laughing. </p>
<p id="xXLoRM"><strong>The way that Agent Smith talks</strong>. I love it. I love the way his words just sort of ooze out of his mouth. He stretches them and twists them and shapes them into full-on Broadway plays. </p>
<p id="UF0pxT"><strong>The way that Agent Smith smirks when Neo freaks out because his mouth has begun to close in on itself</strong>. DO AGENTS LAUGH? BECAUSE THAT OPENS UP A WHOLE NEW STRING OF PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS THAT WE HAVE YET TO CONSIDER.</p>
<p id="A57xQD"><strong>The way the thunder thunders in the background right after Morpheus tells Neo that he’s “the one.”</strong> It’s one of those things where you don’t notice until you notice it, and then it becomes the only thing you can focus on. </p>
<p id="uNOsgL"><strong>Morpheus’s floating glasses</strong>. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="Un23aZ"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="8MqNlO"><strong>“Show me.”</strong> That’s how Morpheus responds when Neo wakes up from a 10-hour training session and says, “I know kung fu.” Morpheus is, out and out, the best character in the movie. He’s the one who gives <em>The Matrix</em> its weight. You need an anchor like Laurence Fishburne’s performance to make everything as fantastical as what we watch happen in <em>The Matrix</em> feel real and legitimate. You watch the gravity with which Fishburne as Morpheus explains the mechanics of the Matrix and you just feel like it’s all absolutely true, and making everything feel like that is the only way a movie like <em>The Matrix </em>works. </p>
<p id="mFInyE"><strong>That shot of Neo and Morpheus right before they start fighting during the sparring session. </strong></p>
<p id="luKp5E"><strong>The little pre-fight Bruce Lee gesture that Neo does where he rubs his nose with his thumb during the sparring session</strong>. It’s such a smart, neat little thing. When we did a live episode of <em>The Rewatchables</em> about <em>The Matrix</em> at SXSW, Jason Concepcion brought up a great point about this moment. He said that the move would be exactly what someone who has just instantly learned kung fu (like Neo has) would do. </p>
<p id="Z10dfB"><strong>The fancy footwork that Morpheus does as he gets in fighting position during the sparring session</strong>. If you see a guy do something like this before y’all start to fight, please know that you’re about to get your ass handed to you. </p>
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<p id="VkMGaK"><strong>The look that Morpheus gives after he asks Neo, “You think that’s air you’re breathing?” </strong>He’s so proud of himself right then. It’s perfect. </p>
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<p id="dvjoux"><strong>The look that Morpheus gives after he dodges one of Neo’s punches when Neo starts getting fast and Morpheus realizes that he might be in a little trouble</strong>. He’s so panicked right then. It’s perfect. (This seems like a good time to point out that Laurence Fishburne was nominated for Best Actor for <em>What’s Love Got to Do With It</em> at the 1994 Academy Awards. He’s a top-level acting talent.) </p>
<p id="wGIikB"><strong>The names of everyone in the gang</strong>. There’s Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, Cypher, Tank, Dozer, Mouse, Apoc, and Switch. And what we know is that Neo’s name inside the Matrix is Thomas Anderson. And what we also know is that Tank and Dozer are the only two people in the gang who were born outside the Matrix. That means that Morpheus, Trinity, Cypher, Mouse, Apoc, and Switch were all pulled out of the Matrix. And if they were pulled out of the Matrix, that means that they had Matrix names like Neo had Thomas. And it’s really funny for me to think about Morpheus giving all of his very heavy speeches, except his name is Tony or Eric or something like that. Or if when he does the “Most of my crew you already know” introduction thing, he doesn’t say, “This is Apoc, Switch, and Cypher,” but instead says, “This is Frank, Carol, and Ronnie.”*</p>
<p id="NybUie"><em>*When Cypher is at dinner with Agent Smith, Agent Smith refers to him as “Mr. Reagan.” Cypher definitely seems like the kind of guy who’d accidentally have the name of someone more famous than he is.</em></p>
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<p id="sMDS0L"><strong>The scene where Neo and Morpheus are walking through the streets in what turns out to be a simulation and Neo gets distracted by the woman in the red dress</strong>. I don’t know how true or fake this is, but there’s a note on <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/trivia">the trivia section of the IMDb page</a> for <em>The Matrix</em> that says the directors hired a bunch of twins for this scene so it’d look like a computer program repeating itself. I hope that’s true. I’m certainly going to treat it like it’s true. </p>
<p id="qhww4Y"><strong>“I want to be rich. And someone important. Like an actor.”</strong> That’s what Cypher says he wants from Agent Smith in exchange for selling out Morpheus and Trinity and Neo and every other human that is directly or indirectly fighting the war against the machines. And that seems like a good exchange, I figure, given that New Cypher is never even going to know that he’s done anything duplicitous. But I’ve seen enough movies to know that asking for things in a vague way like this never ends up that great for the person asking. (There’s a movie called <em>Bedazzled</em> that’s basically about this exact phenomenon. Brendan Fraser keeps asking the devil to grant wishes for him and the devil, played by Elizabeth Hurley, keeps purposely giving him screwed-up versions of what he’s asking for.) Even if Agent Smith did hold up his end of the arrangement, I don’t figure it’d work out so well for Cypher. </p>
<p id="ReKnzt"><strong>The digital pimp</strong>. Mouse has only about 15 lines in the whole movie, and he uses a third of them to try to talk Neo into sleeping with a computer program that he created. </p>
<p id="ZzVtIU"><strong>The slow-motion shot of Neo walking down the stairs the first time he goes into the Matrix</strong>. Keanu is exceptional right here. It’s this really quick scene where the team is walking out of a building and we see everyone else go down the stairs just like a normal person would go down the stairs, but then Neo does it and everything slows down a little and you can see him looking at the ground and the sky and the stairs and the buildings and processing the fact that none of it is real. It’s one of those things you don’t even notice until you’ve watched <em>The Matrix</em> enough times that you start looking past all the big-ticket stuff and start zooming in on all of the smaller bits of brilliance that the Wachowskis put in there. </p>
<p id="zlDqcV"><strong>The kid who tells Morpheus that there is no spoon</strong>. Two things: (1) One of my favorite movie tropes is the thing where whenever someone wants to make a young white boy seem special or bizarre, the adults in his life just shave his head. (2) When Neo walks in, there’s a shelf thing hanging on the wall that holds 40 or 50 decorative spoons. I don’t know what it means (or if it even means anything at all), but it’s an interesting little tidbit. </p>
<p id="X6FWxy"><strong>“Not too bright, though.”</strong> That’s what the Oracle says to Neo when she says that she can tell why Trinity likes him but he doesn’t know that she’s talking about Trinity. </p>
<p id="A5seCk"><strong>The refrigerator magnets in the Oracle’s apartment</strong>. When Neo meets the Oracle, she’s in an apartment kitchen baking cookies. There’s a refrigerator in the background. It has some of those plastic alphabet letters with the magnets in them that are on so many refrigerator doors in America. If you pause the movie, you can see that the letters, which appear to be sporadically thrown up there, are actually arranged in a very deliberate way. Right in the center of the cluster, the words “THE ONE” are spelled out. It’s a slick little Easter egg. </p>
<p id="dmmR1d"><strong>The way all the boards and tiles break when Morpheus and Neo and everyone fall down as they try to make their between-the-walls escape</strong>. It’s really satisfying for some reason. </p>
<p id="BwKCOS"><strong>The overhead shot of Morpheus getting attacked by the police</strong>. There are three very cool shots I always look forward to anytime I watch <em>The Matrix</em>. There’s the overhead shot of Morpheus getting attacked by the police in the bathroom; there’s the up-from-under shot where we see all of the bullets falling from the helicopter during the scene where Neo and Trinity rescue Morpheus; and there’s the sideways shot of everyone crawling through the walls in the building. There are (obviously) tons more very cool shots, but those three for some reason really get in my bones. </p>
<p id="MFfnra"><strong>The way Cypher says “dead” when he’s talking about killing Neo</strong>. “How can he be the one … if he’s <em>DEAD</em>.”</p>
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<p id="nLywDX"><strong>“Guns. Lots of guns.”</strong> That’s what Neo says when Tank asks him what he and Neo are going to need to rescue Morpheus. It’s a cool line, but I mention it here because there’s a nice bit of circularity to point out: Chad Stahelski was Keanu’s stunt double for <em>The Matrix</em>. He’s also, among other things, the director for<em> </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/1/17/18187116/john-wick-chapter-3-parabellum-trailer-breakdown"><em>John Wick 3</em></a>, which will come out in a couple of weeks. There’s a quick part in there where a guy asks John Wick what he needs and Wick replies, “Guns. Lots of guns.” I have to believe that was an intentional hat tip. (It’s very neat to see how differently Young Keanu approaches that line than Old Keanu.)</p>
<p id="hCJasa"><strong>The guy that Trinity kicks to death during the big shootout scene in the building foyer</strong>. There are 60 million bullets fired during that scene and still there’s a guy who ends up dying because Trinity kicks him in the neck. How embarrassing. Probably the only guy who dies a worse death is the guy who was holding his shotgun trying to figure out who to shoot when Trinity sneaks up behind him, kicks the shotgun out of his hands, catches it, then shotgun blasts him in the back, which has to be the henchman equivalent of throwing an interception at the 1-yard line. </p>
<p id="S0VF02"><strong>The way Neo flexes so hard that he knocks the dust out of his sleeves</strong>. It’s the best part of the whole subway fight scene. It’s like if you listen closely enough, you can hear his muscles saying, “Fuck you, Agent Smith.” (The second-best part of the subway fight scene, by the way, is the part where Agent Smith catches one of Neo’s punches right before it hits his face and Neo uses his fingers to flick Agent Smith in the throat. I smile every time.)</p>
<p id="JLE6aN"><strong>The last 20 minutes of the movie</strong>. This certainly does not count as a “little thing,” but I just very quickly wanted to run through it. We get: the subway fight scene, the machines attacking Morpheus’s ship, Neo racing to find a phone so he can get back to the ship, Agent Smith finally getting the jump on Neo and shooting him in the chest nearly a dozen times, Neo dying, Trinity resurrecting Neo, Neo stopping the bullets with his brain, Neo fighting Agent Smith with one hand, Neo jumping inside of Agent Smith and exploding, Neo flexing so hard this time that the walls of the hallway literally wobble, and then Neo flying away to end the movie. What a fucking run. It’s the only stretch of <em>The Matrix</em> that tops its first six minutes. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="wmDiBx"><strong>The lie</strong>. The thing about the alphabet magnets on the refrigerator from earlier is a lie. It’s not even close to true. There are alphabet magnets on the refrigerator, yes, but the rest is a lie. But the fact that people so readily believe things like that about <em>The Matrix</em> speaks to how wonderful and engrossing of a movie is. They spent so much time on so many little details. It’s all great. It’s all so very great.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/28/18285249/the-matrix-1999-20th-anniversary-keanu-reeves-wachowskis-brothersShea Serrano2019-03-28T06:20:00-04:002019-03-28T06:20:00-04:00How ‘Blair Witch’ Became a Horror Sensation—and Invented Modern Movie Marketing
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/F6t1hZ0zojvf0nbIAUbFzM0l-5s=/400x0:2800x1800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63312975/blair_witch_2.6.gif" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://mariozucca.com/" target="_blank">Mario Zucca</a></figcaption>
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<p>The 1999 found-film sensation changed the way that audiences watch—or engage with—movies. (And scared a lot of people, too.)</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="MzCqAM"><em>Avoid the twigs.</em> That’s what David Hochman told himself on January 24, 1999, after a midnight showing of a little indie film called <em>The Blair Witch Project.</em> It was a typically chilly night in Park City, Utah, where Hochman was covering the Sundance Film Festival for <em>Entertainment Weekly</em>,<em> </em>and the<em> </em>movie he’d just watched was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. It opened with a prologue that read: “In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. … A year later their footage was found.” What followed was spliced-together bits of shaky Hi8 video and black-and-white 16mm film footage from the wilderness, punctuated by the three students’ increasingly paranoid arguments, desperate screams, and, eventually, their demise. Hochman left the Egyptian Theater and wandered through the woods to his condo, terrified and wondering whether he’d just watched a snuff film, or an entirely new genre of horror flick.</p>
<p id="6Z1VFh">“That first night it was like magic,” he remembers. Magic enough for him to get inside his head. “You felt like something was going to be out there. I remember sending notes to my editor that night, saying: ‘This is going to be something. I don’t know what it was, but this is going to be something.’”</p>
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<p id="diZIBj">That “something” was a cultural phenomenon that fundamentally changed the way we interact with entertainment. <em>The Blair Witch Project</em>’s principal photography cost <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/may/21/how-we-made-the-blair-witch-project">a mere $35,000</a>, but it went on to gross about $248.6 million at the box office—an indie film record at the time. Stylistically, cocreators Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez conjured a new level of verisimilitude by embracing the equipment and amateur camerawork of the masses, spawning (or at least popularizing) the “found footage” horror subgenre. Promotionally, they extended their storytelling to both web forums and television “documentaries,” upgrading the concept of word of mouth to straight-up virality, and laying the groundwork for future internet folklore. As <em>Adweek</em> <a href="https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/iq-news-analysis-blair-web-project-23184/">noted</a> in 1999, the “little indie that could” left Hollywood “scrambling to figure out if guerrilla marketing on the Web is a blessing or a curse.” Out of nowhere, a troupe of University of Central Florida grads seized the reins of the internet and forged a new path for modern-day moviegoing. </p>
<p id="nDeR9U">“They moved the boundaries of make-believe from the margins of the movie screen out to people’s homes and cable television,” explains Doug Rushkoff, the media theorist who coined the term “viral” in his 1994 book, <em>Media Virus!</em> “The movie no longer started with the lights going down in the movie theater. They broke the rules of make-believe.”</p>
<p id="F7VnWi">Twenty years later, as streaming companies <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2019/1/16/18184386/netflix-mtv-hbo-tweeting-first-person">rush to embrace</a> internet fandom and increasingly rely on <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/9/10/17839914/noah-centineo-netflix-famous-teen-idols">digital communities</a> to boost their content, <em>Blair Witch</em>’s rollout is now seen as a crucial lesson in modern movie marketing. It was a moment when the setting, characters, and story lines of a film could find new life on separate mediums, pushing fans to engage with entertainment on a deeper level. Its influence was personal, rooted as much in the strength of its fan base as it was in the mythos of the story. How did its creators pull off such a monumental viral sensation when the term “viral” was barely mainstream? Like a lot of online phenomena, it was mostly an accident.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="f7pKAD">From the very start, <em>The</em> <em>Blair Witch Project </em>was meant to be a contemporary urban legend. Myrick and Sánchez met at the University of Central Florida’s film school in the ’90s, and bonded over their love of Big Foot and <em>In Search Of…</em>,<em> </em>the late-’70s unsolved mysteries show. They’d hang out at each other’s apartments and <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/531471/blair-witch-project-oral-history">watch</a> documentary-style movies like <em>Ancient Astronauts </em>and <em>The Legend of Boggy Creek.</em> “We just liked those old reality-based shows and how they kind of creeped us out as kids,” Myrick <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20071001001407/http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5924486/the_doityourself_witch_hunt">told</a> <em>Rolling Stone</em> in 1999. “So we wanted to make a horror movie that kind of tapped into that. That fear.” Together, they dreamed up a witch named Elly Kedward. “The idea was somebody doing some kind of filming in the woods, and then coming up upon a really creepy house and going inside it and finding all kinds of satanic, ritualistic stuff,” Sánchez <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/531471/blair-witch-project-oral-history">told</a> <em>The Week</em> in 2015. “Candles, pentagrams—that kind of basic satanic stuff.” (Myrick and Sánchez did not respond to interview requests.) “We called it the woods movie, like shorthand,” says Michael Monello, a UCF classmate who, along with a few others, would reunite with Myrick and Sánchez to produce the project. “We would all say, ‘Hey, we should make that woods movie.’” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="WAerat"><q>“They moved the boundaries of make-believe from the margins of the movie screen out to people’s homes and cable television. The movie no longer started with the lights going down in the movie theater. They broke the rules of make-believe.” —Doug Rushkoff, media theorist and author of <em>Media Virus!</em> </q></aside></div>
<p id="nksn0I">A few years out of school, the two fleshed out the idea and decided to shoot it independently under their collective, Haxan Films. They planned to tell their story in the form of a documentary, padded with faux news clippings and fake interviews that discussed how the missing filmmakers’ footage had been found in the abandoned home of Rustin Parr—a man who killed seven children in his woodland home in the 1940s and blamed their deaths on the so-called “Blair Witch.” (The Blair Witch, according to the eventual <a href="https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/blair-witch-project-true-story-burkittsville-maryland">official canon</a>, was exiled from the colonial town of “Blair, Maryland,” after being accused of letting blood from local children in the late 1800s.) After cutting an eight-minute promotional reel of that concept, they showed it to an indie film rep named John Pierson. “I said, ‘I can’t believe all of this. I’ve never heard about it,’” Pierson recalled telling Myrick in a 1999 <em>Chicago Tribune</em> <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-07-14-9907140115-story.html">interview</a>. “And he said, ‘John, we made it all up.’” Pierson was so impressed that he invested $10,000 in the movie. He also ran two segments of the footage on his IFC television series, <em>Split Screen</em>, in 1997. “I think John started to get a little concerned about the way he was playing it,” Monello says. “And so at the end of the [second] segment he says: ‘So are the Haxan guys pulling our leg or is there really a witch out in the woods of Maryland killing film students? Go to SplitScreen.com and let us know.’”</p>
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<p id="eP4Qa1">In 1995, the internet was just transitioning from government-funded research project to commercial entity; in 1997, when Haxan Films was putting its promotional materials together, the general public was just learning how to use it. Only 23 percent of Americans were going online regularly, according to the <a href="http://www.people-press.org/1999/01/14/the-internet-news-audience-goes-ordinary/">Pew Research Center</a>, and most were using painstakingly slow dial-up connections to do it. People found their way around the web via folksy browsers like Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Google wasn’t founded until the following year, so users relied on search engines like WebCrawler, AltaVista, and Lycos, and discovery-focused services like Yahoo.</p>
<p id="8zssOX">Before social media as we know it, people gathered in the forums of individual websites dedicated to their professional interests and hobbies. Many users were just learning how to make personal websites, and relied on <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/here-is-a-great-collection-of-geocities-pages-peop">kitchy</a> web hosting services like GeoCities. (In 1997, the company had over <a href="https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/timeline/geocities-1997">700,000 “Homesteaders</a>.”) Those who were interested in pop culture also connected in the comment sections of gossip sites like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/16/magazine/the-two-hollywoods-harry-knowles-is-always-listening.html"><em>Ain’t It Cool News</em></a>, bulletin-board-style online communities <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/echo-growing-old-online/524577/">like Echo</a>, or cable TV companion sites like SplitScreen.com. </p>
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<p id="FhH567">All that is to say, in 1997, there were fewer obvious destinations to talk about horror flicks on the internet than there are today. But still, with the help of Pierson’s call to action, curiosity about the Blair Witch mythos began to spread online. Every time IFC reran that <em>Split Screen</em> episode, the show’s online community board was flooded with people who wanted to know more about a creepy old witch and her alleged victims. It became so disruptive that Pierson called Monello and told him to build a website. “He’s like, ‘Your Blair Witch fans are destroying my film community and I need a place to send them,’” recalls Monello. “‘They should be over on your site anyways.’” </p>
<p id="bqeb8Z">By then it was 1998 and the Haxan Films team was in the process of editing the movie. It was still arranged to include the docu-style backstory of the Blair Witch. YouTube didn’t exist, and their team didn’t have the resources to stream a video on the rudimentary website Sánchez had made. (The quality of online videos in the late ’90s was usually terrible, thanks to bad latency and low bandwidth.) Instead they lifted images and details from the story line and presented them as pieces of evidence. They posted <a href="http://www.blairwitch.com/project/legacy.html">pictures</a> of rusty 16mm film cans and waterlogged Hi8 tapes that they claimed were found by University of Maryland anthropology students. A collection of stills from the film was captioned “twelve photos recently released by the Frederick County Sheriff’s office.” At one point, they even scanned pages of what they said was Heather’s journal, after it was found “buried beneath a 100-year-old cabin in the woods.” “A lot of the mythology was built by building the website,” Sánchez told <em>The Week</em> in 2015. “It got to the point where you had to fill in the gaps.”</p>
<p id="kYJJK5">One of the final gaps was Haxan Films’ role in the mystery. They decided to introduce themselves as the film company contracted by the parents of the missing students to edit the fabled tapes, and investigate the events they depicted. Modeling the site after Kevin Smith’s “<a href="https://www.viewaskew.com/main.html">View Askewniverse</a>”—a website that hosted discussions about the connections between Smith’s movies—they frequently popped into forums to offer new tidbits related to the so-called investigation. “We had written ourselves into the mythology,” Monello says.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/z86694ngu88RrF3gLOZGTKL1Omo=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/15990829/Screen_Shot_2019_03_21_at_11.40.09_AM.png">
<cite>BlairWitch.com</cite>
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<p id="pCkAAJ">In today’s parlance, Haxan Films created an “expanded universe” for <em>Blair Witch</em>, long before anyone really knew what that was. They filled out a story line with enough rich details to fuel endless discussions. Soon enough, people became scholars of the mythology, and built their own websites to sift through the clues that blairwitch.com fed to them. The creator of one page called “The Blair Witch Project Chronicle” explained exactly how he became enamored of the legend: After his teenage son showed him the movie trailer, he searched for “the blair witch project” online and stumbled upon the website. “As I browse the history of the legend, which tells the creepy story starting with the witch’s first attacks on children, I slowly realize that I have goosebumps,” he wrote. </p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0OR9KkVJjFgWB7qH_p2yCC4sWjc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/15990831/unnamed.png">
<cite>Courtesy Michael Monello</cite>
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<p id="6vbBK7">These days, every two-bit beauty blogger and their mother preaches the virtues of “engagement”—the online marketing principle that says interacting with your followers is the best way to get more of them—but in 1998, the Haxan Films guys were just touched that people were paying attention. “As an indie filmmaker in Orlando, Florida, with no prospects of where [their film] is going to be sold, just kind of having anyone interested in your work is very flattering,” Monello says. “We were able to talk to people, but still kind of maintain the world that we were building. We made intentional marketing decisions, but interacting with fans online was not an intentional marketing decision.” Meanwhile, Pierson was redirecting hordes of people on the <em>Split Screen</em> listserv to blairwitch.com. </p>
<p id="nGEX3O">Haxan Films did, however, do a few things that are now considered part of the core curriculum in the internet hype machine handbook. First, it created an email newsletter to update fans on the progress of the film—a communications channel that allowed them to speak more frankly about the filmmaking process without ruining the mythos they’d built over on blairwitch.com. Second, they made merch branded with the logo of the twig figure that was heavily featured as a prop in the film. “Basically that was our Nike swoosh,” Monello says. Third, the team turned to the channels they knew to be most accessible: their extended network.</p>
<p id="zCsf6I">Ahead of Sundance, Kevin J. Foxe, an executive producer on the film, held a screening in the East Village and invited friends, family, and every publicist he knew. To make things festive, the crew collected sticks from a nearby park, made them into their signature twig man, and hung them in the lobby above the snack tables. “We didn’t realize how psychologically traumatic it was for the audience,” Foxe says. “People just wandered out like zombies and didn’t eat the food and kind of freaked out when they saw the stick figures and wandered off into the Village.”</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/4ysbUuY_tQSTxZ_Sg0G2LLZte7k=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/15990835/BlairWitch_FanSite08.png">
<cite>Courtesy Michael Monello</cite>
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<p id="oknLCD">Separately, Foxe tapped into yet another underground distribution network when he printed a 35mm version of the film for Sundance: bootlegs. As someone who’d worked in post-production, he knew that office employees often made screeners for themselves. “I talked to the guys who just worked for $5 in the back room,” Foxe says. “I said, ‘Make copies, show it to your friends, do whatever you want.’” An unfinished version of the movie eventually made its way online, only further authenticating its “found” nature and fueling conspiracy theories around the mystery of the Blair Witch. In January, just ahead of the 1999 Sundance Festival, <em>Ain’t It Cool News</em> <a href="http://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/2764">made its first mention</a> of <em>Blair Witch.</em> The day Foxe hopped in his car to drive from L.A. to Utah, he turned on the radio to hear <em>Kevin and Bean</em>, an alt-rock L.A. morning show, talking about the movie. “I just listened to this going, ‘Oh my god, this is crazy! It’s crazy.’” He spent his 10-hour drive intermittently checking the number of visitors on the Blair Witch website, which grew from around 10,000 to 60,000. Though that was only a fraction of the estimated 16 million AOL members that existed around that time, it was still significant for a team with no mainstream exposure. (Especially considering that only 41 percent of American adults <a href="http://www.people-press.org/1999/01/14/the-internet-news-audience-goes-ordinary/">used the internet</a>, and the most popular online news attraction was weather.) By the night of the movie’s January 24 screening, 100,000 people had visited the website. News outlets began picking up on the buzz. The legend of <em>Blair Witch</em> was taking root before almost anyone had seen it.</p>
<p id="61SQcD"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="xCp2pJ">Though the record of <em>Blair Witch</em>’s<em> </em>initial underground fandom has mostly been lost to fallen GeoCities and broken URLs, its Sundance debut is part of cinematic history. Immediately after that eerie midnight screening, Artisan met with Haxan Films and purchased the distribution rights of the movie for $1.1 million. What Haxan Films had seen as a fun online side project, Artisan saw as the ticket to the film’s commercial success. And part of the deal they inked involved a roadmap of the marketing plan. </p>
<p id="QcWvyZ">Myrick and Sánchez’s team would still play a role in fostering the burgeoning Blair Witch community online, but Artisan would use its resources to supercharge those efforts. As Jeff Gordinier would note in an <em>Entertainment Weekly</em> <a href="https://ew.com/article/1999/11/26/1999-year-changed-movies/">cover story</a> a few months later—and as <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18282097/1999-movies-week-a-celebration-of-the-best-year-in-film"><em>The Ringer </em>is currently celebrating</a>—1999 was a banner year for movies. <em>Blair Witch </em>was set to come out smack dab in a cyclone of summer blockbusters (<em>Wild Wild West</em>, <em>American Pie</em>, <em>Muppets From Space</em>) and pedigreed dramas (<em>Summer of Sam</em>,<em> Eyes Wide Shut</em>), meaning it had added pressure to stand out. On April Fools’ Day, Artisan relaunched blairwitch.com with more clues, and kicked off a college screening tour to stoke hype for the film among the young and internet-savvy. (Personal laptops were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/28/laptops-sales-desktop-computers">not yet widespread</a> among college kids, but students were still more likely to have access to the internet.) The following day Artisan “leaked” the movie’s official trailer on <em>Ain’t It Cool</em> <em>News </em>and then to MTV. In July, they premiered a <em>Blair Witch Project</em> comic book. </p>
<p id="2AiUd2">In the year 2019, Artisan’s game plan is almost exhaustingly familiar. The slow, steady release of new, “exclusive” content to handpicked news sites and fan communities is in the fabric of every major movie release today. Casting rumors, set photos, costume previews, and the excited blog and social media posts that follow are standard practice; the rise of meme marketing has only bolstered the hype. <em>A Star Is Born</em> generated significant conversation online by way of its <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/10/17959158/a-star-is-born-memes-bradley-cooper-lady-gaga-oscars">memeable trailer</a> this past summer, and <em>Bird Box </em>recently <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/1/3/18167278/bird-box-memes-netflix-bots-marketing">capitalized</a> on the gimmicky nature of its blindfolded characters, inspiring countless memes and igniting a viral challenge on YouTube and TikTok. In general, Netflix has banked its promotional strategy on <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/9/10/17839914/noah-centineo-netflix-famous-teen-idols">teen fan bases</a> and the average internet user’s fear of missing out. But in 1999, appealing to the online community—or even acknowledging it existed—was entirely new marketing territory.</p>
<p id="5ZV5zk">“They were really using the idea of extending the film into these auxiliary products,” Dan North, a historian who has <a href="https://drnorth.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/cloverfields-obstructed-spectacle/">written</a> about the “found footage” marketing campaign of subsequent films like<em> Cloverfield</em>, tells me. “They weren’t just using those to sell the film. They were using them as part of the experience.” </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><div id="49IVR8"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/2OpPrfniS21gCj6NCf34Vi" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="BBxAIS">Haxan Films was intentionally ambiguous on its website for the sake of compelling storytelling, but Artisan’s marketing campaign manipulated the truth much more aggressively. Using the same documentary-style footage that ran on <em>Split Screen</em>, it aired a one-hour Blair Witch special on the Sci Fi Channel that was presented as truth, a week ahead of the movie’s premiere. (M. Night Shyamalan <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-jul-19-et-scifi19-story.html">attempted to recreate</a> this marketing stunt with Sci Fi for his 2004 film, <em>The Village. </em>But that time, Sci Fi was forced to admit it was an elaborate hoax.) They released a soundtrack for the film that was presented as a copy of the mixtape found in Josh’s abandoned car the weekend he and the two other filmmakers disappeared. Artisan even arranged for the three main actors’ IMDb pages to say they were “missing, presumed dead.” “That was decided without our knowledge even,” Foxe tells me. According to Foxe, and <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/531459/blair-witch-project-oral-history-part-3">past interviews</a> with Sánchez, Haxan Films had mostly agreed they would withhold context from—rather than lie to—the public, but Artisan pushed that line. “On the internet, it’s easy to establish your own reality,” John Hegeman, Artisan’s executive vice president of worldwide marketing, told <a href="https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/iq-news-analysis-blair-web-project-23184/"><em>Adweek</em></a> that year. “That’s what makes it so much fun.” (Lionsgate, which bought Artisan in 2003, declined to comment for this story.) </p>
<p id="zRbSqi">Soon Foxe began to realize how powerful misinformation on the internet could be. He recalled a screening event in L.A. where he and Heather Donahue struck up a conversation with a fellow partygoer who believed Donahue had died in the film. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t convince him otherwise.</p>
<p id="dZwUY2">“I said ‘This is Heather, you’re talking to her,’” Foxe says. “He wouldn’t believe it. She showed him her ID. He’s like, ‘No, no, no, you’re not.’” It goes to show just how deeply people <a href="https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/gyxxg3/they-wished-i-was-dead-how-the-blair-witch-project-still-haunts-its-cast">believed what they read online</a> at the time. If IMDb said that Heather Donahue was dead, and a handful of confused media outlets and GeoCities sites confirmed it, then that was enough to convince this partygoer that she was dead. “The internet was the truth,” Foxe says. “It was like a second library.” Years later, Donahue is still grappling with what it felt like to be part of that phenomenon. “It’s quite a thing to crawl out from under: To have your obituary actually written when you’re 24, in both literal and figurative ways,” she told <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/the-blair-witch-projects-heather-donahue-is-alive-and-well"><em>GQ</em></a><em> </em>in 2016. (Donahue did not reply to a request for comment.)</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="2Ii9Cq"><q>“I think it was easy to look at the website and the fan base online and call it marketing. The story that was missed was how the internet was going to connect fans.” —Michael Monello, producer</q></aside></div>
<p id="lqu0lE">In <em>Media Virus!</em>, Rushkoff theorizes that, as the landscape to distribute information becomes more technologically advanced, stories that contain screens within screens will spread more swiftly than static reports. A story like the Rodney King beating didn’t become huge simply<em> </em>because it revealed police brutality, it became huge because someone caught that police brutality on tape. “In other words, once you’re watching media about media, you’re moving into the viral landscape,” Rushkoff tells <em>The Ringer.</em> “It’s like that moment in the dressing room when you see yourself in the mirror behind yourself at the same time, and you get a million yous down an infinite tunnel. Media just loves media. If you have a media story, the media can’t help but cover it.” </p>
<p id="c7Wqh5">With <em>Blair Witch</em>,<em> </em>every element of Artisan’s marketing exploited so-called “found” pieces of media that could be passed around from online user to online user. And when it came time for the movie’s nationwide premiere, fans had devoured so many breadcrumbs that they were hungry for a whole sandwich. This was apparent to Haxan Films when they sent their email listserv the movie’s opening weekend theaters. “We started getting tons of people saying: ‘Hey, that’s not anywhere near me. How can I see the film?’” Monello says. “Our response was: ‘Call your local theaters and ask them to play it.’” This kind of rallying cry to fans is a common way to drum up publicity for a film today—especially for titles like <em>Black Panther</em> or <em>Crazy Rich Asians</em> that showcase a long-overdue diversity in their casts. But in the case of Haxan Films, it was mostly a happy accident. Fans phoned nearby theaters, which relayed their messages to regional managers, who sent in requests to Artisan. Week after week, the film opened in more locations. It was ultimately the 14th-highest-grossing film of 1999—earning more than <em>American Pie </em>and<em> Big Daddy. </em>Neither a horny teen movie nor a major Adam Sandler–led comedy could compare to the draw of found footage in the woods. As Myrick told <a href="https://variety.com/2019/vintage/features/blair-witch-project-1203123291/"><em>Variety</em></a> in 1999: “We were at the right place at the right time.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="dD4Ge8">The same subversive techniques that were heralded as ingenious marketing in 1999 are now also considered to be the nexus of mass media’s dysfunction. <em>The Blair Witch Project</em> rose to fame by blurring truth and fiction, exploiting the internet’s communication channels to deceive the public and profit from it. And though it would have been impossible for either Haxan Films or Artisan to predict the problems that would plague media in 2019, the film is an undeniable predecessor to viral hoaxes like “the Momo challenge” and the scourge of misinformation that still plagues social media platforms. “I hate to say it but we played a part of that,” Foxe says. “Were we the harbinger of fake news? I hope not. I don’t know what’s harmless or harmful anymore. I’ve lost track of everything. But that’s what you do, right? You start to slowly erode the trust factor.”</p>
<p id="RUpyXs">Still, in Monello’s eyes, <em>Blair Witch</em> is set apart by the quality time spent by fans dissecting the fantasy of the story. They wanted to weave elaborate theories, cross-reference evidence, and creep themselves out, years before they’d see the movie. It was a way to pique people’s imagination during a time when the internet was still largely devoid of video, and mostly used for straightforward information-gathering. In a way, the Blair Witch site was a precursor to both the rich fan-run subreddits and studio-sponsored brand “activations” of today. It should be no surprise that Monello is now the founder of Campfire, a New York–based marketing agency that has created immersive experiences for shows like <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/16/16156852/westworld-experience-immersive-theater-marketing-sdcc-2017"><em>Westworld</em></a><em> </em>and <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2017/03/03/518166877/resistance-radio-darkly-reimagining-the-60s-sound"><em>The Man in the High Castle</em></a>.</p>
<p id="sNHHaX">“I think it was easy to look at the website and the fan base online and call it marketing,” Monello says. But he insists that when Haxan Films first made the <em>Blair Witch</em> website, it was mostly just fans interacting. “The story that was missed was how the internet was going to connect fans.”</p>
<p id="GwyttX">A network of enthusiastic followers could have the power to directly influence the content its members want to consume—whether that comes in the form of a superhero series cribbed from a beloved comic book series or a <a href="https://www.thefader.com/2018/10/09/zola-twitter-thread-movie-a24--janicza-bravo-taylour-paige">Twitter thread</a> that goes viral.</p>
<p id="cReJCC">“The idea that fans are now connected was going to be so important to the future of the film industry,” Monello says. “It was going to change the kinds of movies that Hollywood was going to make.”</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="w8bYxB">Long before the rise of Russian troll factories and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/12/19/18148701/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-year-in-review">easily manipulatable social media giants</a>, <em>Blair Witch</em> exploited a budding online media ecosystem for the sake of pure amusement. It piqued the imagination of America and put Hollywood on notice, teaching viewers to demand more from their entertainment companies, and entertainment companies to cater to the most obsessive factions of their audience. Now, content creators big and small are practically required to maintain a constant conversation with the internet. This strategy has been especially beneficial to streaming giants like Netflix and Hulu. But 20 years ago, it was a groundbreaking idea that reshaped the way the public watched movies. <em>Blair Witch</em> extended storytelling beyond the physical confines of a movie theater, into discussion forums across the internet, supplemental TV specials, and, of course, on late-night walks through the woods.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/28/18280988/blair-witch-movie-marketing-1999Alyssa Bereznak2019-03-28T05:50:00-04:002019-03-28T05:50:00-04:00‘Star Wars: Episode 1–The Phantom Menace’ Is the Most Important Movie of 1999. Seriously.
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<figcaption>Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>Derided in its time and savaged over the years, George Lucas’s first prequel was a strange, if inevitable innovation: the cinematic origin story for an advanced pop figure. And an inauguration of a glorious future. Maybe making Darth Vader cuddly wasn’t such a bad idea after all.</p> <p id="y6o8u8"><em>Welcome to 1999 Movies Week, a celebration of one of the best years in film history. Throughout the week, </em>The Ringer<em> will highlight some of the year’s best, most interesting films, and in this series, make the case for why a specific movie deserves to be called that year’s best. Next up is </em>Star Wars: Episode 1–The Phantom Menace<em>, George Lucas’s much-maligned first prequel.</em></p>
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<p id="RJqKMt"><em>The Phantom Menace</em> really does begin with a bug-eyed alien speaking, in a mock-Japanese accent, about a commercial trade dispute. It all begins—it really does begin—with Obi-Wan Kenobi (!) and Qui-Gon Jinn (?) sitting down for tea together as a craft-services droid tries to murder them.</p>
<p id="bSIbAV">The aliens—a Neimoidian consortium known as the Trade Federation—launch a blockade over Naboo, a wealthy planet that the Trade Federation plans to invade. The Galactic Senate dispatches the two Jedi to mediate the dispute between the Trade Federation and Naboo. The mock-Japanese accents, as reprehensible as they are, get me thinking about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria: In September 1931, the Kwantung Army fabricated a Chinese nationalist attack on a Japanese railway in order to deceive the League of Nations about their subsequent invasion of the Chinese mainland. In <em>The Phantom Menace</em>, the Trade Federation misleads the Galactic Senate to obscure the Neimoidian invasion of Naboo. George Lucas’s turning a 20th-century atrocity into a movie about intergalactic tariffs, but then turning the movie about intergalactic tariffs into a movie about underage romance, minstrel rabbits, and motorsports: It’s such a perfectly George Lucas thing to do.</p>
<p id="lhisu0">Naboo’s monarchy resolves the planet’s sovereignty crisis by dispatching a precocious 10-year-old boy to blow up the Trade Federation’s doughnut-shaped space station with his slick, silver gunship. (The Japanese occupation of Manchuria ended with the U.S.’s nuking two cities and the Soviets’ routing the Kwantung Army.) The boy Anakin Skywalker would become Darth Vader. The boy Jake Lloyd, who played Anakin Skywalker, would become a pariah. So, too, would George Lucas.</p>
<p id="lnt5wl"><em>The Phantom Menace </em>was maligned in its time, and it goes disparaged in posterity, if only because <em>The Phantom Menace</em> launched the long and infamous phase when <em>Star Wars</em>, a cherished saga, kinda sucked. There’s a United Nations subcommittee and a Hague tribunal dedicated to resolving our planet’s grief about these movies, which demystified so many lofty concepts and characters while disgracing several actors. Natalie Portman, Ewan MacGregor, and Liam Neeson survived the prequels, but George Lucas, Jake Lloyd, and <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/jar-jar-binks-actor-ahmed-best-considered-suicide-star-wars-backlash-1124848">Ahmed Best</a> may never live them down. In May 1999, <em>The Phantom Menace</em> nearly cauterized <em>Star Wars</em> as a 20th-century phenomenon that incinerated upon contact with the 21st. The <em>Star Wars</em> prequels are, in sum, quite bad, though bad for reasons that largely exceed <em>The Phantom Menace</em> in particular. <em>Attack of the Clones</em> is a script-and-acting disaster in its own right; and <em>Revenge of the Sith</em>, a better-designed drama, struggles to overcome soap opera stasis in pursuit of a substantial, tragic conclusion. It’s more fun to overthink <em>Attack of the Clones </em>and <em>Revenge of the Sith</em>, and to argue about those movies, than to sit down and actually watch the young Obi-Wan Kenobi investigate a rainy, gray planet for several consecutive minutes or Yoda and Mace Windu discuss various emergencies with all the urgency and passion of a C-SPAN interview. <em>Attack of the Clones</em> and <em>Revenge of the Sith</em> disgraced <em>The Phantom Menace</em> far more than <em>The Phantom Menace </em>disgraced itself. </p>
<p id="ythN1Q">But <em>The Phantom Menace</em> is, and has always been, better than the <em>Phantom Menace</em> discourse. It’s a bonkers movie that dared to transform one of fiction’s great monsters, Darth Vader, into a fun-loving, freewheeling dumbass who suffers no chaperones. <em>The Phantom Menace</em> enlists Portman to play an undercover queen who, as a minor subplot, must occasionally pretend to be a hand servant while trading places with a body double (played by Keira Knightley). The movie also requires Portman to speak in a stiff, formalistic diction that counterintuitively allows her to address the byzantine political intrigue with some memorable conviction. The original trilogy presented the Sith and Jedi knights as, well, knights, and then Lucas transformed these mortal enemies into dueling glow-stick ballerinas. <em>The Phantom Menace</em> is far more simplistic and delightful than the later two prequel movies, starring the older, moodier Hayden Christensen, would allow. Anakin Skywalker—as played by Lloyd—is the heart, if not the star, of this movie about diplomacy, lineage, and duty. <em>The Phantom Menace</em> was a strange, if inevitable innovation: the cinematic origin story for an advanced pop figure. <em>The Phantom Menace </em>sure was something to watch.</p>
<p id="CjbUbi">The movie’s many demerits—the minstrel accents, the Gungans, the battle droids, the doughnut ship, the Battle of Naboo, the Jedi Council—they’re all so prominent in the earliest <em>Phantom Menace</em> trailer; and the earliest <a href="https://www.starwars.com/video/episode-i-teaser-trailer"><em>Phantom Menace </em>trailer</a> was nonetheless exciting. There was a time—a prerelease window—when Lloyd cut an enigmatic figure. There was a time, I shit you not, when Lucas was unambiguously proud to introduce Jar Jar Binks to <em>Star Wars</em> fandom. Ceremoniously, <em>The Phantom Menace</em> marked the end of George Lucas’s harassing <em>Star Wars</em> fans with nothing but “special edition” edits to the original trilogy. For 16 years, <em>Star Wars</em> fans rationed fan fiction and Super Nintendo adaptations. The original movies raised a generation of science-fantasy obsessives, and so, too, did the inexhaustible glut of toys, games, and paperbacks inspired by the original trilogy. Finally, the prequels cultivated a second generation. There was new <em>Star Wars</em>, courtesy of Lucas, who, at last, spared no expense.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="z6FSyv"><em>The Phantom Menace </em>inaugurated peak fandom—a century so far defined by maximum serialization. <em>The Phantom Menace</em> is a rough and fumbling movie; it’s also a glorious movie, which we are, in some sense, always watching. For better or worse, George Lucas taught everyone else how to make movies, and how to watch movies, in the age of sprawling blockbuster fandom. <em>The Phantom Menace</em> endures as influence, despite all its own humiliations. To watch it now is to see the new century in fantasy blockbusters and Marvel origin stories flashing before your eyes, a dismal past and a joyous present, childhoods ruined, box offices demolished despite good sense, critical dissent, and fan backlash. Through Lucas’s countless apprentices, the empire endures.</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/28/18282707/star-wars-phantom-menace-episode-one-george-lucas-1999Justin Charity2019-03-27T09:28:43-04:002019-03-27T09:28:43-04:00How ‘Cruel Intentions’ Killed the ’90s Teen Movie—and Became an Instant Classic
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://efichaliko.com/" target="_blank">Efi Chalikopoulou</a></figcaption>
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<p>The high school version of ‘Dangerous Liaisons’—starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Reese Witherspoon, Ryan Phillipe, and more than a little sex—pushed boundaries so far that it broke them. Twenty years later, its creators are still a little surprised it got made at all.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="MCt2WV">“You’ve got killer legs.”</p>
<p id="CO3KTR">Sebastian Valmont, a 17-year-old wearing the suit of a 35-year-old Bear Stearns employee, is hitting on his therapist. He seems dour and troubled, having somehow lived on earth long enough to become a full-blown sex addict. But by the time he’s holding onto a parting hug with the therapist for five seconds too long—and vaguely humping her—it’s become clear that this is just an act. He’s trolling her for his own pleasure. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="eWFSkr"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The 50 Best Movies of 1999, Part 1","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/25/18274634/1999-movies-ranking-top-50"},{"title":"The 50 Best Movies of 1999, Part 2","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18277205/1999-movies-ranking-top-50-part-two"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="9Ek355">As Sebastian leaves the therapist’s office, she gets a phone call from her daughter (played by a post–<em>Big Lebowski</em>, pre–<em>American Pie </em>Tara Reid). She’s in tears, in a full-on panic. A guy—Sebastian, actually, which we know because the daughter has helpfully taped a picture of him to her computer—seduced her into taking nude photos and then uploaded them on the internet without her consent. The therapist, incensed, chases down Sebastian, yelling at him through the glass wall of a second-story hall. He smiles up at her in a way that communicates generations of entitlement and a sort of infuriatingly soulless evil; cops swarm—around the therapist, of course; a woman approaches Sebastian; he hits on her; she’s into it.</p>
<p id="drcWgZ">“She was charging too much,” Sebastian tells his stepsister, Kathryn, in the next scene, explaining why he felt it necessary to ruin multiple lives in one fell swoop. Moments later, he and Kathryn engage in some light incest.</p>
<p id="JFwupg">Fewer than 12 minutes into <em>Cruel Intentions</em>—the 1999 film that took an era of teen movies to another level and, in effect, ended the era altogether—Sebastian Valmont has committed a cybercrime and an act of sexual assault and has flirted with another felony. And he is, without question, the hero of the movie.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="mfv5cE">Every generation gets the teen movie it deserves. The ’80s got a decade full of John Hughesian sexual awakening; currently, the 2010s are seeing a rise in <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/9/11/17843744/crazy-rich-asians-set-it-up-netflix-contemporary-rom-com">made-for-social-media romance</a> on Netflix. In the second half of the 1990s, a teen movie boom was swelling. Starting with <em>Clueless </em>in 1995, the genre officially exploded in December 1996 with the release of <em>Scream</em>. Wes Craven’s horror flick never topped the box office but had a rare and remarkable staying power, making <em>more </em>money in its second and third weeks than in its first, holding a steady audience after that, and remaining in theaters for a whopping 18 weeks. By the time <em>Scream </em>was out of theaters in late May 1997, the movie had made $173 million worldwide on a $14 million budget and the teen movie was Hollywood’s newest hack, as studios began to make a concerted effort to target the MTV generation. “Suddenly every place was open for business for teen movies,” <em>Can’t Hardly Wait</em> codirector Harry Elfont <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/6/11/17442324/cant-hardly-wait-20th-anniversary">told <em>The Ringer</em></a><em> </em>last June. “It didn’t even need to be a horror movie. [Studios] just realized that there was a huge teen audience that was being underserved, so everybody was looking for teen scripts.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="1LwaDI"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="R40Pug">1997 brought <em>I Know What You Did Last Summer </em>and <em>Scream 2</em>, both obvious descendants of <em>Scream</em>, both hugely successful ($72.6 million and $101.4 million domestic totals, respectively). The next year brought <em>Can’t Hardly Wait</em>, a your-life-could-change-in-a-night party movie that, like <em>Scream</em>, mixed earnestness with self-awareness and presented a fantastical version of teenage life. Then came the deluge of 1999, a year dominated by this brand of teen movie: <em>Varsity Blues</em>, <em>She’s All That</em>, <em>Jawbreaker</em>, <em>Cruel Intentions</em>, <em>10 Things I Hate About You</em>, <em>Never Been Kissed</em>, and <em>American Pie </em>all hit theaters in the first seven months of the year.</p>
<p id="u3i9S4">It was a glorious time, accompanied by the breakout of MTV’s <em>Total Request Live </em>and the emergence of the WB’s <em>Dawson’s Creek</em>–led slate of programming, as execs seemed to realize all at once that the interests of young people were a viable source of commodification.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="9cLUGY"><q>“You have a few moments in your life where you’re struck with a good idea, and I was literally outside of a Crunch Gym on Crescent and Sunset, and I had the idea to do <em>Dangerous Liaisons </em>[set] in high school.” —<em>Cruel Intentions</em> writer-director Roger Kumble</q></aside></div>
<p id="sJ2vaG">By 2000, the <em>Scream </em>franchise had grown into adulthood with <em>Scream 3</em>, leaving only <em>Bring It On </em>to hold up the mantle of the late-’90s teen movie. By the end of 2001, <em>Not Another Teen Movie</em>, a send-up of nearly every teen flick from the era,<em> </em>put the genre in the ground for good. </p>
<p id="eS2mF0">Genres come into fashion and just as quickly fall out of favor all the time in Hollywood. But the teen movie of the late ’90s burned particularly fiercely, and its rapid disappearance is a bit perplexing on paper. There are several explanations for this: mere oversaturation, a change in the country’s political climate, the film industry’s turn toward franchises in the 2000s. But another explanation is that this version of the teen movie had been so forcefully pushed to its brink—by one movie in particular—that the only possible next steps were parody and then, soon after that, extinction. </p>
<p id="K5nAhM"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ensNli">It took Roger Kumble only 12 days to write the script for <em>Cruel Intentions</em>. “You have a few moments in your life where you’re struck with a good idea, and I was literally outside of a Crunch Gym on Crescent and Sunset, and I had the idea to do <em>Dangerous Liaisons </em>[set] in high school,” says Kumble, who would also go on to direct the movie. </p>
<p id="JYU4rL">It was April 1997, and Kumble had been enamored of Todd Solondz’s <em>Welcome to the Dollhouse</em>, a movie he says showed him for the first time that “kids can be so awful.” There had already been two film adaptations of <em>Les Liaisons Dangereuses</em>, the 1782 novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in which two high-born French ex-lovers make a game out of seducing, controlling, and exploiting others. In 1959, French director Roger Vadim set an adaptation of the novel in then-present-day France, while an American period piece written by Christopher Hampton, directed by Stephen Frears, and starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer was released in 1988. “Everyone knows the Hampton version,” says Kumble, “but I took more from Vadim because Vadim did it first and modernized it.” </p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Sarah Michelle Gellar" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/mnfpGHi6qmpSdaj1OGcmNLiHfv4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/15989853/GettyImages_159838351.jpg">
<cite>Columbia Pictures</cite>
<figcaption>Sarah Michelle Gellar</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="uGZREx">Kumble’s main characters, Sebastian and Kathryn Valmont (played by Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar), are, in the model of the novel, plainly evil—crass, heartless, devious; the main plot sets off when Sebastian declares it his mission to bed Annette Hargrove, a virgin from Kansas City who’s saving herself for marriage (played by Reese Witherspoon), and Kathryn bets that he’ll fail. The reward should he succeed? Permission to have sex with Kathryn, his stepsister. “You can put it anywhere,” she tells Sebastian, a promise that convinces him to take the bet.</p>
<p id="dvnXxU">But Sebastian and Kathryn are also undeniably magnetic—cool, rich, impossibly mature and sexually advanced. They are antiheroes before antiheroes existed. And, perhaps most importantly, they’re still in high school.</p>
<p id="ReecQT">“I just thought it was really daring,” says Neal Moritz, who jumped at the chance to produce <em>Cruel Intentions</em>. “It was a very, very different teen movie. There were some people who thought we were crazy to go make a movie like this, that it was just too risque. My girlfriend at the time was like, ‘Man, that’s really pushing the edge.’ But I think that’s ultimately why I really liked it, to be honest.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><div id="XKS1QH"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/2OpPrfniS21gCj6NCf34Vi" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="W1QcgV">The boldness of Kumble’s script, its unapologetic cruelty, was a self-marketing machine. “The script had heat with that generation,” Kumble recalls. <em>Cruel Intentions </em>was exactly the kind of project young actors were looking for: a clearly R-rated movie that’d signal a departure from the PG-13 fare they’d been exclusively cast for in the past. Having worked with Gellar and Phillippe a year before on <em>I Know What You Did Last Summer</em>, Moritz got the two actors to sign on for <em>Cruel Intentions </em>before they had even secured studio backing. The role of Annette was a bit harder to cast. Katie Holmes and Vinessa Shaw both read for the role, but neither ended up taking it. So Kumble turned to one of his stars for help. “I was hanging out with Ryan and I’m like, ‘What about your girlfriend?’” By that point, Witherspoon had made a few splashes in movies like <em>Fear </em>and <em>Pleasantville</em>. </p>
<p id="4zGVxN">“So we took [Reese] out to dinner,” says Kumble. “We ended up getting pretty drunk. I remember getting on my hands and knees and begging. I’m like, ‘Just do it. Fifteen days.’ And to Reese’s credit, she was like, ‘Uh, the character needs work.’ I was like, ‘Come over tomorrow. We’ll fix it.’ She and I worked on the character for three days, just strengthening it—Reese is insanely smart, and she definitely brought [in] the character’s convictions.” (Witherspoon declined to comment for this article.) “It was nutty,” says Moritz. “It was this thing that even cool actors were interested in, so we went off and started making the movie without a distributor.” </p>
<p id="swkkiv">During a meeting with Amy Pascal, Sony’s new chair, Moritz told her about <em>Cruel Intentions</em>. “She said, ‘Why aren’t we making that movie?’ and I said, ‘Well, your predecessor actually said they didn’t wanna make it.’ But then she read it and was like, ‘I have to have it.’”</p>
<p id="uPSgav">“It was really sexy and it was really provocative, and people weren’t making stuff like that in those days,” says Pascal. “It was a really sophisticated teen movie, an R-rated, sexy teen movie that was the first of its kind. And that’s what I always wanted to be doing.”</p>
<p id="Vh9wpT">The commandeering studio exec who curbs a creator’s instincts is a well-worn Hollywood trope, but it was actually Pascal who pushed Kumble and Moritz to stick to their guns with <em>Cruel Intentions</em>. “She was like, ‘Go for it,’” says Moritz. </p>
<p id="CErYwg">“Amy Pascal, I owe her everything,” Kumble says. “We had tested the movie, and it didn’t test well. All of the cards were like, ‘I hate that he dies at the end.’ In the hands of a lot of studio executives, I would have been reshooting. And Amy said, ‘The reason why your movie’s testing so bad is because they love it.’”</p>
<p id="87yq1w">“That was awesome,” Pascal says, laughing and remembering the early reactions. “I mean, that was the whole idea. Golly, why would you do it otherwise?”</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="Jgjbqq"><q>“It was really sexy and it was really provocative, and people weren’t making stuff like that in those days. It was a really sophisticated teen movie, an R-rated, sexy teen movie that was the first of its kind. And that’s what I always wanted to be doing.” —former Sony Pictures chair Amy Pascal</q></aside></div>
<p id="MSnKdD">With Pascal’s encouragement, the final product of <em>Cruel Intentions </em>is exactly what the original script promised: a shocking spin on the teen movie that maintained the genre’s penchant for fantasy and wish fulfillment while stripping away all of its naivete and saccharinity. It was melodramatic, openly rude, mean, sometimes grotesquely sexy, and anti-LGBTQ. Sebastian breaks into a house where two men are having sex and starts taking photos, to be used for blackmail. In another scene, Gellar’s Kathryn writhes on top of Sebastian before getting up, looking at his crotch, and whispering, “down, boy”; in another, she teaches Selma Blair’s Cecile how to kiss in the middle of Central Park. “Someone said, ‘You need to go again—there was spit between their lips,’” Kumble says, recalling the scene. “And [our cinematographer] Theo [van de Sande] goes, ‘No, it’s beautiful.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s beautiful. Fuck that.’” </p>
<p id="Pcdgnf">The movie ends with Sebastian’s being abruptly hit and killed by a car—in Central Park, of course—before Annette exposes Kathryn’s deceit (and coke problem) to the world and drives off into the sunset to the tune of the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” After 90 minutes of near smut, the turn toward soap opera is a shock to the senses—par for the course for <em>Cruel Intentions</em>—but it’s also undeniably affecting. And in the midst of a teen movie boom, the weird chemistry of <em>Cruel Intentions</em> stood out. “We just really felt like we were on the edge,” says Moritz. “Honestly, it felt like the movie was either really going to work or be a total disaster. It didn’t feel like there was any kind of in-between.”</p>
<p id="2RQOP2">“It was shockingly cruel and shockingly honest,” says Pascal, adding: “Everything had to push the edge to be interesting.”</p>
<p id="GifgEW"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="wDAgWq"><em>Cruel Intentions </em>was released on March 5, 1999, taking in $13 million in its first weekend to finish second at the box office behind <em>Analyze This</em>. (The movie returned to theaters March 22 this year for a special one-week run.) Altogether, it was a success: By the end of its theatrical run, the movie had made nearly $76 million worldwide on a $10.5 million budget. What’s more, it almost instantly became iconic—Gellar and Blair won Best Kiss at the 2000 MTV Movie Awards, Phillippe and Witherspoon’s real-life relationship allowed fans to continue to follow Sebastian and Annette’s story, and <em>Cruel Intentions </em>itself enjoyed a second life on the movie slates of premium channels, providing a foundation for the twisted sexual awakenings of teenagers everywhere. (Even today, there is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDzBNdwNka8">a disconcerting number</a> of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVH2nWImLLc">Sebastian-Kathryn tribute videos</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWz9XyPyL9o">on YouTube</a>.) </p>
<p id="a5zvJX">But despite the success, <em>Cruel Intentions </em>has no heirs (unless you count the two forgettable, straight-to-video sequels that were released in 2001 and 2004, respectively). <em>American Pie </em>would be released four months after <em>Cruel Intentions </em>and become the most successful teen movie of the era, taking in over $235 million worldwide. Because of the movie’s massive success—and because in the movie, a character humps an apple pie—it became the main talking point in terms of pop culture’s depictions of teen sex. But <em>American Pie</em>’s sexual nature is more puerile and played for humor, whereas <em>Cruel Intentions</em>’ is projected with a straight face and borderline haunting. As the most lascivious entry in the ’90s teen movie boom, <em>Cruel Intentions </em>is one of the most notable films of the era. But it might also be the movie that popped the bubble. Because after pushing the boundaries so far, where else is there to go?</p>
<p id="xfOg03">“I think we successfully killed the [teen movie],” says Joel Gallen, who helmed <em>Not Another Teen Movie </em>in 2001. In the late ’90s, Gallen spent most of his time producing the MTV Movie Awards. As part of the job, he’d direct the short parodies that ran during the shows—such as the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjmrMOroCRE">“Ben Stiller as Tom Cruise’s stunt double” short</a>, and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZq-DXWMZCw">“Lisa Kudrow plays a Jedi” clip</a>, among many others. That made him the perfect person to send up the teen movie genre, an idea championed by none other than Neal Moritz and Amy Pascal.</p>
<p id="weyp58">“There was such a spate of teen movies, and it just became, like, every teen movie was the same thing,” Moritz says. “And I was like, ‘OK, I wanna make fun of what we’ve been doing.’”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="sxgshX"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Make the Case: ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Is Actually a Comedy, and the Best Film of 1999","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18281132/eyes-wide-shut-best-movie-1999-stanley-kubrick-tom-cruise"},{"title":"The First Rule of Making ‘Fight Club’: Talk About ‘Fight Club’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18281406/fight-club-davis-fincher-making-of-brad-pitt-edward-norton"},{"title":"Do ‘Get Out’ and ‘Being John Malkovich’ Exist in the Same Universe?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18282095/get-out-being-john-malkovich-catherine-keener-jordan-peele-spike-jonze"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="9vKSt9"><em>Scary Movie </em>had been released in July 2000 by Miramax and was an instant success, if not a cultural phenomenon. It made over $42 million in its first weekend on the way to a worldwide total of $278 million. Its extremely referential humor and smart-alecky brand of cynicism quickly became the new, accepted mode of comedy—but also paved a way forward for Hollywood in general, creating a blueprint for how studios could build on existing properties while at the same time appearing innovative and original. And after horror, no other genre was more primed for a takedown than the teen movie. “There were just so many teen movies, and so many conventions of teen movies that were ripe for parody,” says Gallen.</p>
<p id="t8Hv7o">Released in December 2001, <em>Not Another Teen Movie</em>—starring Captain America himself, Chris Evans—uses <em>She’s All That </em>as the backbone to its story, but heavily parodies the absurdity of <em>Cruel Intentions</em>, spoofing Kathryn and staging a version of the iconic kissing scene that features an elderly woman and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w3Q0o9C4uI"><em>a lot </em>more saliva</a>. “I loved it,” Moritz says. “I just thought it was a good, funny way to take the piss out of it. … It was just a great send-off of that genre.”</p>
<p id="mC2xPo">The movie itself isn’t exactly a shining testament to power of filmmaking. It’s consistently infantile and frequently gross, relying on a substantial amount of potty humor. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/not-another-teen-movie-2001">wrote</a>, “It was not good to see yet still more wretched excess in the jokes about characters being sprayed with vast quantities of excrement.” In a 2014 interview, Evans <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwQMMz-34d0">mused</a>, “The movie had me stick a banana in my ass. It wasn’t exactly some highbrow art.”</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jAYOq0Bl6j6eWqmsjqyO_-tebi0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/15989859/GettyImages_159841072.jpg">
<cite>Columbia Pictures</cite>
<figcaption>Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="8SB6oN">But the quality of the movie is hardly the point—what it called attention to was far more important. Thanks in large part to <em>Cruel Intentions</em>, teen movies had grown to be, while enjoyable, absolutely ridiculous. After a movie in which the most sexual tension is between two characters who are related by law, the only viable next step was a commentary on that preposterousness. (In <em>Not Another Teen Movie</em>, Catherine responds to her brother’s protests that they can’t have sex because they’re related by saying, “Only by blood.”) </p>
<p id="KpgHWX">“You always have to keep moving forward,” Pascal tells me. “It was just like, what can we do that would be cool? That would push the envelope again?”</p>
<p id="Ly0Nb6">In calling attention to the tropes of the teen movie, and to how over-the-top this version of the genre had become, <em>Not Another Teen Movie </em>effectively ended it. After turning the era into the butt of the joke, there was no going back. And really, no one did go back: The late-’90s teen movie disappeared—or perhaps more accurately, ran off and found a more stable home at Fox and the WB. </p>
<p id="nT2n3L">“It is crazy that there really haven’t been [anymore movies like that],” Gallen says. “I’m sorry if we played a part in that, in crushing a franchise. I’m sure it’s just a crazy coincidence, but it is ironic.”</p>
<p id="yenvHd"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="E4Njna">The history of Hollywood is a story of associative evolution. Nothing happens in a vacuum—everything is in reference or in reaction to something that came before it. That is no more evident than in the life cycle of the teen movie, from the early days of <em>Rebel Without a Cause </em>and <em>American Graffiti </em>to the John Hughes–dominated ’80s to the boom of the ’90s, which added a sheen of beauty and fantasy to the genre before <em>Cruel Intentions </em>sauntered in wearing a corset to dial the sex, mischief, and overall vileness to 11 and bring an era to its logical conclusion. From there, the genre could only look inward and self-immolate. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="M0UBnF"><q>“There was such a spate of teen movies, and it just became, like, every teen movie was the same thing. And I was like, ‘OK, I wanna make fun of what we’ve been doing.’” —<em>Cruel Intentions</em> producer Neal Moritz</q></aside></div>
<p id="QWAiFs">“Look, genres kind of go away,” Moritz says matter-of-factly. Or they go through cycles; less than a decade later—years after <em>Cruel Intentions</em> had stretched the genre to a breaking point and <em>Not Another Teen Movie </em>had made audiences aware of that breaking point—what emerged in its place was a more down-to-earth, truer-to-life kind of teen movie, kicked off by 2007’s <em>Superbad</em>, a film that was <em>also </em>green-lit by Pascal. (“Oh that’s so funny, I never really thought about it that way,” Pascal tells me when I note how, as chair of Sony, she oversaw the films that lit a match under the teen movie, burned it to the ground, and raised it from the ashes. “I guess the push to continue to move forward is responsible for that. At the time, Sony and everybody else I worked with on these movies, we were all trying to do something good.”)</p>
<p id="2V7huf">Gone were the teenagers who dressed (and looked) like adults; gone were the psychosexual schemes and arch motivations; gone was the fantasy. In their place were a much more humble brand of storytelling and characters who truly reflected audiences. “There were no movies that were really capturing what we were experiencing,” Seth Rogen told me when we <a href="https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2017/8/30/16222874/superbad-ten-years-later-seth-rogen-judd-apatow">spoke about <em>Superbad </em>in 2017</a>, “so we wrote one.” That sort of teen movie became the mode, and is still the foundation for today’s era of teen movies, films like 2017’s <em>Lady Bird</em>, 2018’s <em>The Kissing Booth </em>and <em>To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before</em>, and Olivia Wilde’s upcoming <em>Booksmart</em>. The ethos of <em>Superbad </em>lives on, though as years have passed, filmmakers like Greta Gerwig and Susan Johnson have built on it to make movies that are more confident, less sexually frustrated, and less male-centric. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="zgZdg0">What we have now is kinder, more empathetic, more eager to embrace the awkwardness of sex and growing up. But we couldn’t have gotten here without Sarah Michelle Gellar snorting cocaine out of a crucifix and dry-humping her stepbrother into oblivion.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/27/18281534/cruel-intentions-1999-90s-teen-moviesAndrew Gruttadaro2019-03-27T09:27:34-04:002019-03-27T09:27:34-04:00Make the Case: ‘The Insider’ Is About the Cost of Doing What’s Right—and It’s the Best Film of 1999
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NSCWa8t_tBwuPxow3iNw25FGz6Q=/231x0:2898x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63308292/insider.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.adamvillacin.com/" target="_blank">Adam Villacin</a></figcaption>
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<p>Throughout the week, The Ringer will highlight some of the year’s best, most interesting films, and in this series, make the case for why a specific movie deserves to be called that year’s best. Next up is Michael Mann’s tense thriller ‘The Insider.’</p> <p id="ak4tkR"><em>Welcome to </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18282097/1999-movies-week-a-celebration-of-the-best-year-in-film"><em>1999 Movies Week</em></a><em>, a celebration of one of the best years in film history. Throughout the week, </em>The Ringer<em> will highlight some of the year’s best, most interesting films, and in this series, make the case for why a specific movie deserves to be called that year’s best. Next up is Michael Mann’s tense thriller </em>The Insider<em>.</em></p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="7W7Eua">
<p id="YTmffG">In November 1999, I went to see Michael Mann’s <em>The Insider</em> in Boston. I sat in the dark for almost three hours, watching Mann’s account of <em>60 Minutes</em> producer Lowell Bergman’s efforts to bring the story of tobacco industry whistleblower Dr. Jeffrey Wigand to television screens. I walked out of the theater into what was apparently, according to Weather Underground’s archives, a windy 40-degree Massachusetts day, and then I almost certainly lit a Camel Light, because that is what I did every time I left a movie theater from about 1998 to 2010. </p>
<p id="IXaoDJ">Starring Russell Crowe as Wigand and Al Pacino as Bergman, <em>The Insider</em> is a procedural that would sit nicely in a Netflix carousel next to <em>The China Syndrome</em>,<em> All the President’s Men</em>,<em> Silkwood</em>,<em> </em>and <em>A Civil Action</em>, and subsequent films like <em>Erin Brockovich </em>and <em>Spotlight</em>. These are movies (usually based on true stories) that reckon with righting the scales of justice, the dogged pursuit of the truth, and the public’s right to know about what institutions—corporate, governmental, or otherwise—are doing behind their backs. The fact that I lit up immediately after seeing a movie about how the tobacco industry engineered cigarettes to create a “nicotine delivery business,” in <a href="http://www.jeffreywigand.com/60minutes.php">Wigand’s words</a>, does not mean that <em>The Insider</em> somehow failed in getting its point across. It is about a lot of things, but the dangers of smoking is pretty low on the list. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="sO4kJP"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The 50 Best Movies of 1999, Part 1","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/25/18274634/1999-movies-ranking-top-50"},{"title":"The 50 Best Movies of 1999, Part 2","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18277205/1999-movies-ranking-top-50-part-two"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="ootRq1">Coming off the modest domestic success of <em>Heat </em>(a movie which has since been <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/8/7/16109854/hall-of-fame-heat-with-bill-simmons-and-chris-ryan">canonized</a> at <em>The Ringer</em>), working from a ripped-from-the-headlines screenplay cowritten with Eric Roth (based on Marie Brenner’s 1996 <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1996/05/wigand199605"><em>Vanity Fair </em>article</a>), and featuring two of the biggest movie stars in the world (Crowe was coming off <em>L.A. Confidential</em> and would go on to make <em>Gladiator</em> and <em>A Beautiful Mind</em> in the subsequent years) topping his cast, Mann had the leverage to make a blow-by-blow of Wigand’s seduction and betrayal. But he still had to figure out how to tell the story. Where <em>Heat</em> and <em>The Last of the Mohicans</em> had depicted panoramic landscapes, <em>The Insider</em> was a movie concerned with intense conversation and contemplation. </p>
<p id="ucqM8W"><em>The Insider</em> begins with a moment that would be the climax in any other film of its ilk. We meet Wigand <em>after</em> his split from the tobacco giant Brown & Williamson. He has been fired after clashing with higher-ups at the company over the use of ammonia chemistry—a process which essentially enhances nicotine’s effects on the body. Maybe he’s already decided to blow the whistle on the company, either as an act of vengeance or of decency. It’s hard to tell with Wigand. </p>
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<p id="3nXPZO">Enter Bergman, who helps Wigand realize this compulsion to speak, for better or for worse. Bergman, along with his longtime correspondent Mike Wallace (played by Christopher Plummer), produces a segment on big tobacco for <em>60 Minutes</em>, featuring an explosive interview with Wigand in which he accuses the head of Brown & Williamson of perjuring himself before Congress. In order to get around Wigand’s nondisclosure agreement, Bergman also orchestrates Wigand’s testimony in a Mississippi court, as part of the state’s suit against the tobacco industry. However, when it comes time to air the <em>60 Minutes</em> segment, CBS corporate gets involved, nixing the broadcast of the interview. Bergman accuses the likes of Wallace, <em>60 Minutes </em>creator Don Hewitt, and others at the company of caving in the face of a possible sale of the network to the Westinghouse Corporation. The last hour of the movie follows Bergman’s efforts to force CBS to air the interview, while keeping Wigand from going off the deep end. </p>
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<p id="dVCfbm"><em>The Insider</em> is an issue movie, and a journalism movie, and one scene of an absolutely gangbusters <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNKmmA6_oTQ">courtroom drama</a>, but really, it’s a Michael Mann movie, which means it’s a heist movie. It’s about the strictures put around the truth, and how one goes about unlocking it. Four years earlier, Pacino had costarred in <em>Heat</em>, playing a detective hunting down his criminal counterpart, a master thief played by Robert De Niro. In <em>The Insider</em>, Pacino is the burglar, trying to prise something free from Crowe’s grasp. </p>
<p id="3qPAEa">The performances of the two leads offer a great study in contrast. Pacino is outrageously good, screaming about ethics in journalism with his “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvTpEoi0tzE">SHE’S GOT A GREAT ASS</a>” voice. As Bergman, he spends a lot of time espousing the moral and institutional superiority of <em>60 Minutes</em>, name-dropping the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse, and busting his coworkers’ chops for not being on his level. Crowe, hulking and intentionally out of shape, hides Wigand behind unfashionable glasses and boxy gray suits. This is a man who is uncomfortable everywhere—with his family, with his coworkers, on his own. The happiest he seems in the entire movie is when he is addressing a group of students about chemistry after taking a job teaching in a Louisville high school, but for the most part Crowe plays Wigand as a rather unpleasant public health crusader. If that’s really what he is. There’s an ambiguity to Wigand’s motivations: Does he want to do good, or screw over the people who jeopardized his family’s well-being? Does it matter which one it is?</p>
<p id="Mxlepg">Most of the first two-thirds of the film is made up of Bergman fiddling with the dials, trying to tune into Wigand’s frequency and get at what this source is sitting on. Early on, in a meeting in Louisville, Bergman comes at him straight on and asks, “Why are you working for tobacco in the first place?” Wigand looks down and says, “I can’t talk about it.” This is taken to be in reference to Wigand’s NDA, but it makes Bergman laugh. You want to dance? We’ll dance. </p>
<p id="7F7IMQ">That’s what Pacino does for the rest of the movie: He dances around his kill like a predator. Once he gets wind of Wigand, he never lets go of the scent, and there are these wonderful moments when we just get to see Pacino, high off his own sensory awareness, poring through documents or waiting for a fax to come in or for someone to call him back, angling for a meeting to break his way, or maneuvering someone to do what he wants and think it’s their own idea. He is a lot like a thief, but instead of a safecracker and a gun, he has a mobile phone and a Rolodex of contacts. <em>The Insider</em> might be the last great phone movie ever made—released right before texting and email became the primary form of professional and personal communications. At the time of release, Mann told <a href="https://www.salon.com/control/1999/11/04/mann_2/"><em>Salon</em></a>, “The picture is two hours and 32 minutes of talking. Everything is dialogue. On the one hand you could view it as a horrible restriction; on the other hand you could view it as this great adventure.” Everything in this movie is intimate. It’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgNwbJTF7fY">all domestic</a>, taking place in living rooms, hotel rooms, bedrooms, and offices. Doors get closed for privacy, tips get passed under the breath while standing at a bar, crucial conversations take place as side chatter at restaurants or during bus rides. </p>
<p id="zenOlq">This may be ultimately why <em>The Insider</em> is a somewhat forgotten film from 1999, and in Mann’s catalog. It’s comparatively quiet. It’s not about the pursuit of a serial killer, or John Dillinger, or a bank robber. It’s not a biopic of a famous figure. When Wallace meets Wigand and his wife, he derisively asks Bergman, “Who are these people?” Bergman responds: “Ordinary people under extraordinary pressure.” </p>
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<p id="Ji1p0d">Bergman sticks up for his source, but he and Wigand could not be more different. Their few attempts at chitchat—at one point Bergman asks Wigand, “You think the Knicks are gonna make it to the semifinals?”—are painfully awkward. The thing that unites them is the same thing that unites all of Mann’s central characters: a pride in work, and an obsession with perfecting the process of that work. By the end of the film, Brown & Williamson has run Wigand through the ringer, orchestrating a smear campaign against him that temporarily derails Bergman’s support of his story. But, ultimately, what seems to drive Wigand is not being taken seriously, being brushed aside, being rejected. He is too good at his job for that to be his fate, and he reacts aggressively in response.</p>
<p id="HNAzq9">Bergman behaves the same way in the face of his own challenges. In the movie’s emotional climax (I guess every time Pacino opens his mouth it’s an emotional climax), Bergman dresses down Hewitt over the neutering of his story, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJfyFoZcetY">defends leaking details</a> from behind the scenes to <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em> and the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. </p>
<p id="CsVv8J">For most of the movie, Bergman wears <em>60 Minutes</em> like a badge of honor. But, as he will later tell Wallace upon resigning from the show, “What got broken here doesn’t go back together again.” He walks away from the pinnacle of his profession because they didn’t treat his work the way it deserved to be treated. To Mann, there is no greater crime. </p>
<p id="JEMAm4">The visual style of <em>The Insider</em>—handheld, invasive, close-to-the-skin shots of people working and thinking and living—is in harmony with the story’s thematic concerns. This film asks: What goes on inside people’s heads? That makes it like a lot of the best titles that came out in 1999. In a year that saw movies like <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/25/18280334/being-john-malkovich-spike-jones-best-movies-1999"><em>Being John Malkovich</em></a> and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18281406/fight-club-davis-fincher-making-of-brad-pitt-edward-norton"><em>Fight Club</em></a> imaginatively actualize the dark territory of the human mind, <em>The Insider</em> poeticizes what we <em>can’t</em> know about people. It is filmed from just outside touching distance of understanding, with many shots of Wigand looking as if they were set up on his lapel, or just behind his ear, like the camera is trying to burrow into his mind. <em>The Matrix </em>and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18281132/eyes-wide-shut-best-movie-1999-stanley-kubrick-tom-cruise"><em>Eyes Wide Shut</em></a> inspired reams of analysis, unpacking their meaning and symbolism. What you see is what you get with <em>The Insider</em>, save for one moment of fantastical imagery, when, in a moment of crisis, Wigand’s hotel walls dissolve into an imagined scene of domestic bliss—his children playing in the backyard—as he reflects on everything he’s sacrificed to do the right thing. </p>
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<p class="c-end-para" id="VGutKx">That’s the central question <em>The Insider</em> asks, I think: Why do we do the right thing? Why does doing the right thing often seem like an act of self-harm? Why does doing the wrong thing often seem like an act of self-preservation? Does it matter if Wigand was a relatively unpleasant person? Does it matter that Bergman manipulated him to get the story he wanted, regardless of what it did to Wigand’s personal life? Does it matter that <em>60 Minutes</em> ultimately gets the credit for running the story, even if they initially choked during the first airing of the piece? I keep going back to what Mann, the consummate action director, told <a href="https://www.salon.com/control/1999/11/04/mann_2/"><em>Salon</em></a>: “It’s actions that count, not what motivated you to do them. There’s no purely motivated action in this motion picture—not on the part of Wigand, not even on the part of Lowell. It’s life.”</p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/27/18283731/the-insider-al-pacino-russell-crowe-best-movies-1999Chris Ryan2019-03-26T09:01:42-04:002019-03-26T09:01:42-04:00Do ‘Get Out’ and ‘Being John Malkovich’ Exist in the Same Universe?
<figure>
<img alt="John Malkovich and Daniel Kaluuya" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/4C9fcK9mQUax8nxD2pRz5DLgZ8Q=/292x0:2959x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63302231/malkovich_get_out.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>USA Films/Universal Pictures/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yes, and we have definitive proof</p> <p id="QQLi12">Last year, when Catherine Keener was promoting <em>Incredibles 2</em>, she was asked during a <a href="https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2436120/watch-catherine-keener-learn-about-the-get-outbeing-john-malkovich-connection-for-the-first-time">press junket</a> whether she would ever reprise any of the characters she’s played in the past. “I can’t imagine, they’ve kind of all been put to bed,” she said. The interviewer then informed her that there is a theory that her character in <em>Get Out</em> is actually the same person as her character in <em>Being John Malkovich</em>. Keener blinked. “Because the whole idea of people being put into other people’s brains,” the interviewer said. Keener’s eyes went wide, and her face assumed an expression halfway between “people on the internet should go outside” and “I am alarmed by how much sense this actually makes.” Said Catherine Keener, “Wow.”</p>
<p id="jcjRUb">That was, roughly, my reaction when I first read about this theory last week, after rewatching <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/25/18280334/being-john-malkovich-spike-jones-best-movies-1999"><em>Being John Malkovich</em></a>. What a simpler existence I led just seven days ago, for now I am in the Sunken Place—a state of mind in which I believe that <em>Get Out</em> and <em>Being John Malkovich</em> occur in the same universe. (I’m calling it “The Mind Control Universe”; to keep you from confusing it with other cinematic universes I will refer to it as “The MCU.”) </p>
<p id="w94NxL">That tinkling sound you hear of a spoon against a teacup? Don’t worry, that’s just me dragging you down into this abyss with me. Relax.</p>
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<p id="nAo93d">A surreal collaboration between screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, <em>Being John Malkovich</em> is a tale as old as time: Three relatively miserable people stumble upon a portal into the mind of actor John Malkovich, which allows one to inhabit Malkovich’s body for 15 minutes before being dropped into a ditch near the Jersey Turnpike. An unwashed John Cusack plays Craig, a sad-sack part-time puppeteer and full-time office drone who lives with his animal-loving wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz and a wig) but falls in love with his seductive/disinterested coworker Maxine (an Oscar-nominated, aspirationally outfitted Keener). Maxine, in turn, falls in love with Lotte—but only when Lotte is inhabiting Malkovich’s body. Craig goes to increasingly disturbing lengths to keep the lovers apart, but he finally makes the mistake of climbing into the Malkovich portal just after it has closed, leaving his soul trapped in some sort of metaphysical purgatory. After becoming pregnant by the body of John Malkovich while Lotte was inhabiting it (I probably should have mentioned that this article is NSFW), Maxine gives birth to a daughter, Emily, whom she and Lotte happily intend to raise together. Except, as we learn in the last scene of the movie, Craig’s soul is actually trapped in the young daughter’s body. Talk about a classic setup for a sequel!</p>
<p id="KSh0tJ">As the theory (which likely began on Reddit but has now become widespread enough to warrant its own lengthy section on the <em>Being John Malkovich</em> Wikipedia page) goes, Maxine and Lotte continued to crave the experience of inhabiting other people’s bodies, even after the Malkovich portal had closed. They eventually crossed paths with neurosurgeon Roman Armitage, the malevolent patriarch of <em>Get Out</em>, who transplanted the spirit of dressed-down Cameron Diaz into the body of Bradley Whitford (Malkovichy <em>enough</em>, I guess, given the options). Of course when you relocate your family to try and find illicit portals into other people’s consciousness, it’s always wise to assign everybody new identities, so “Rose Armitage” is actually grown-up Emily, and such is the nuance of Allison Williams’s performance that I didn’t even <em>realize</em> she was playing a disgruntled John Cusack trapped in a young woman’s body until at least the third viewing.</p>
<p id="o1xdaE">Obviously, the most glaring difference between these two films is that one is a thoughtful meditation on race in 21st-century America, while another is a movie about a bunch of white people who want to be John Malkovich. These stories may appear incompatible. If Maxine and Lotte really <em>were</em> as horrifically racist as the Armitage family, wouldn’t we have at least seen hints of that worldview in <em>Being John Malkovich</em>? I briefly believed this was a deal-breaker for this theory, until I fell even deeper into the Sunken Place and realized that the true, conscious architect of the scheme’s racism is Roman Armitage, who could have recruited Maxine and Lotte and in doing so awakened a latent hatred within them. If the internet can do this, so can Roman Armitage.</p>
<p id="3nOAsm"><em>OK, fine, this all checks out</em>, you are definitely thinking, <em>but if all this were true, wouldn’t Rose Armitage, technically a vessel for the imprisoned spirit of Angsty John Cusack, be desperately in love … with her own mother?</em> At which point I would remind you of the bottomless nuance in Allison Williams’s performance, which contains more notes than a fine rosé. Also … she kind of dresses like Maxine did in <em>Being John Malkovich</em>? Which may be her way of paying homage to her beloved mother’s peerless ’90s style.</p>
<p id="GX1BNT">Still on the fence? What if I told you that the place where Chris finds the incriminating photos of Rose’s past paramours in <em>Get Out</em> is … BEHIND A VERY TINY DOOR?</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Daniel Kaluuya looking toward a small open closet door in ‘Get Out’" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/k7bfc_qUZHOxw5CVehaJ-DNTbkw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/15987206/Screen_Shot_2019_03_25_at_10.48.30_AM.png">
<cite>Universal Pictures</cite>
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<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="John Cusack peeing into a tiny door in ‘Being John Malkovich’" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/iGz3DEdXPU44LDeBEwTnNJDUKgc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/15987209/Screen_Shot_2019_03_25_at_4.38.51_PM.png">
<cite>USA Films</cite>
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Daniel Kaluuya crying in ‘Get Out’" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wVzH_U32-MYqhp2GXY-nZu2AwuM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/15987223/Screen_Shot_2019_03_25_at_4.43.17_PM.png">
<cite>Universal Pictures</cite>
</figure>
<p id="Qkq51Y">In a December 2017 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBvcngHRTFg">video</a> for <em>Vanity Fair</em>, Jordan Peele was asked to comment on several <em>Get Out</em> fan theories. When he came to the <em>Being John Malkovich</em> hunch, he said, “I love this theory, I have heard this theory. It was definitely not lost on me that I was able to get Catherine Keener in her second, like, weird-perspective, living-in-someone-else’s-brain movie. We joked about that, and I’m a huge fan of the movie <em>Being John Malkovich</em>.” Peele claimed he even discussed it with Spike Jonze after<em> Get Out</em> was released, and the two shared a laugh. “So as far as I’m concerned,” Peele added, “it’s true.”</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="8SAiA8">Maybe the deepest link between these movies is that they are both imaginative enough to keep fans talking and speculating about them long after their initial release. It’s a testament to <em>Being John Malkovich</em> that 20 years after it came out, people on an internet that barely existed back then are still trying to concoct theories that help wrap their heads around it. And although little is certain in this life—such as, say, whether or not the screaming demonic spirit of Craig Schwartz is inhabiting the body of Rose Armitage—I can say one thing for sure: We’ll still be musing about <em>Get Out</em> on its 20th anniversary, too.</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18282095/get-out-being-john-malkovich-catherine-keener-jordan-peele-spike-jonzeLindsay Zoladz